My friend Michael Sledge turned me onto Toyota Kata. This excellent book explores the underlying culture within Toyota that enables all of their well-known processes and tools to actually yield sustainable advantage (and that enabled them to be developed, in the first place!). Through observation of Toyota’s processes, Rother realized that the magic isn’t really in the processes. Instead, it comes from deeply ingrained cultural behaviors for continuous improvement and coaching that have developed over decades and are practically invisible to those within the system, because it’s just the “Toyota way”.
I recommend this to anyone who wants to make ANY process improvement initiative really stick.
Click the link above to find it on Amazon.