25 Manufacturing Books That Will Boost Your Business
/Read some of the best books about manufacturing to increase your knowledge, improve your skill level, and elevate your competitiveness in the industrial market. These are must-read manufacturing books for 2021 that cover lessons in leadership and lean and reveal the past, present and future of modern manufacturing.
By Michelle Segrest, Navigate Content, Inc., — Reporting on the Industry
Whether you are an engineer, operator, technician, CEO, maintenance professional, craftsman, or just interested in how things are made, these books will increase your knowledge about manufacturing and boost your business. In no particular order, these are some the greatest manufacturing books of all time.
Books About Lean Manufacturing
1. The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook: A Quick Reference Guide to 100 Tools for Improving Quality and Speed (1st Edition) By Michael L. George, John Maxey, David Rowlands, and Mark Price.
The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook blends Lean and Six Sigma tools and concepts, providing expert advice on how to determine which tool within a "family" is best for different purposes. Packed with detailed examples and step bystep instructions, it's the ideal handy reference guide to help Green and Black Belts make the transition from the classroom to the field.
2. Everything I Know About Lean I Learned in First Grade By Robert O. Martichenko
Every lean practitioner occasionally wishes for a simple, fun, and quick-read introduction to lean thinking to give acquaintances, associates, and family members – even to our kids. If lean thinking often entails unlearning a plethora of bad habits, wouldn’t it better if we learned better thinking – and habits – from the beginning? Everything I Know About Lean I Learned in First Grade is just that sort of book. It brings lean back to its original simplicity by showing how lean is alive in a first grade classroom. The book connects common lean tools to the broader lean journey, shows how to identify and eliminate waste, and aids the reader in seeing lean for what it truly is: a way to create a learning and problem-solving culture. Written to educate the entire organization on the fundamentals of lean thinking, this is the perfect source to engage all team members at all levels of an organization.
3. Building a Lean Fullfillment Stream: Rethinking Your Supply Chain and Logistics to Create Maximum Value at Minimum Total Cost By Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe
Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream will change the way you think about your supply chain and logistics networks - giving you a way to act using lean principles to transform and continuously improve. In this pioneering workbook, lean logistics veterans Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe explain step-by-step a comprehensive, real-life implementation process for optimizing your entire fulfillment stream from raw materials to customers, including two critical concepts: calculating the total cost of fulfillment and collaborating with across all functions and firms along the stream. Your company, like most, probably calculates costs at different points within departments, such as the piece price paid by the purchasing department. Few companies figure the total cost associated with each major function across the fulfillment stream.
4. Lean Analytics: 3 Books in 1: The Complete Guide to Using Data to Optimize and Build a Better Startup Business (Lean Methodology) By Jeffrey Riles
Master Lean Analytics & become an expert!
Focus on data that matters & improve efficiency!
Included in this collection are the top books to help you improve, grow and master your skills on Lean Analytics. Learn to track and optimize the metrics that will matter the most to your project.
Included books:
Lean Six Sigma: A Beginner’s Step-By-Step Guide To Implementing Six Sigma Methodology to an Enterprise and Manufacturing Process
Lean Enterprise: The Complete Step-by-Step Startup Guide to Building a Lean Business Using Six Sigma, Kanban & 5s Methodologies
Lean Analytics: The Complete Guide to Using Data to Track, Optimize And Build A Better And Faster Startup Business
Books About Manufacturing Management & Leadership
5. The Toyota Way, Second Edition: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer By Jeffrey Liker
The bestselling guide to Toyota’s legendary philosophy and production system―updated with important new frameworks for driving innovation and quality in your business. One of the most impactful business guides published in the 21st Century, The Toyota Way played an outsized role in launching the continuous-improvement movement that continues unabated today.
6. Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric By Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann
How could General Electric—perhaps America’s most iconic corporation—suffer such a swift and sudden fall from grace? This is the definitive history of General Electric’s epic decline, as told by the two Wall Street Journal reporters who covered its fall.
Since its founding in 1892, GE has been more than just a corporation. For generations, it was job security, a solidly safe investment, and an elite business education for top managers. GE electrified America, powering everything from lightbulbs to turbines, and became fully integrated into the American societal mindset as few companies ever had. And after two decades of leadership under legendary CEO Jack Welch, GE entered the twenty-first century as America’s most valuable corporation. Yet, fewer than two decades later, the GE of old was gone.
Lights Out examines how Welch’s handpicked successor, Jeff Immelt, tried to fix flaws in Welch’s profit machine, while stumbling headlong into mistakes of his own. In the end, GE’s traditional win-at-all-costs driven culture seemed to lose its direction, which ultimately caused the company’s decline on both a personal and organizational scale. Lights Out details how one of America’s all-time great companies has been reduced to a cautionary tale for our times.
7. Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results By Mike Rother
This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower. Drawing on six years of research into Toyota's employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company's organizational routines that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation.
8. Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn: Lessons from Toyota Leader Isao Yoshino on a Lifetime of Continuous Learning By Katie Anderson
In Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn, leadership coach Katie Anderson and Toyota leader Isao Yoshino bring you a remarkable book about what it means to learn, to lead, and to care. Created through years of collaboration, this book offers their shared reflections on leadership and learning, providing readers an inspirational experience that defies generational and cultural divides.
With a career that spanned nearly four decades at Toyota Motor Corporation, Isao Yoshino’s stories help us understand how Toyota intentionally developed the culture of excellence for which it is renowned today, and how one person learned to lead so that he could lead to learn. Katie Anderson weaves together these heartwarming stories of personal discovery, and offers her own unique perspective on them, with the intention of helping you learn to lead and lead to learn.
9. Make It Right: 5 Steps to Align Your Manufacturing Business from the Frontline to the Bottom Line By Kevin Snook
In this groundbreaking book, Kevin Snook reveals how the manufacturing leader can be instrumental in making it right. He shares simple but powerful practices for rapidly turning a manufacturing division around, distilling his 30 years of frontline experience with managing hundreds of the world’s best (and worst) manufacturing companies into a step-by-step alignment process that you can use to implement change that’s effective in days rather than years.
Kevin has led companies around the world based on the methods of management legends like Peter F. Drucker, and has implemented lean, high-performance work systems. In the era of Industry 4.0, Kevin has built on those foundations to formulate a highly effective process for aligning your manufacturing organization to deliver sustainable growth.
Books About The History of Manufacturing
10. The Reckoning By David Halberstam
After generations of creating high-quality automotive products, American industrialists began losing ground to the Japanese auto industry in the decades after World War II. David Halberstam, with his signature precision and absorbing narrative style, traces this power shift by delving into the boardrooms and onto the factory floors of the America’s Ford Motor Company and Japan’s Nissan. Different in every way—from their reactions to labor problems to their philosophies and leadership styles—the two companies stand as singular testaments to the challenges brought by the rise of the global economy.
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author, this book is filled with intriguing vignettes about Henry Ford, Lee Iacocca, and other visionary industrial leaders, The Reckoning remains a powerful and enlightening story about manufacturing in the modern age, and how America fell woefully behind.
11. Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success By Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, and Rob Wertheimer
Three top Wall Street analysts reveal enduring lessons in sustainable success from the great industrial titans―the high-tech companies of their day―to the disruptors that now dominate the economy.
Before Silicon Valley disrupted the world with new technologies and business models, America’s industrial giants paved the way. Companies like General Electric, United Technologies, and Caterpillar were the Google and Amazon of their day, setting gold standards in innovation, growth, and profitability. Today’s leaders can learn a great deal from their successes, as well as their missteps. In this essential guide, three veteran Wall Street analysts reveal timeless lessons from the titans of industry―and offer battle-tested survival tactics for an ever-changing world.
12. The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction By Robert C. Allen
The Industrial Revolution was a pivotal point in British history that occurred between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries and led to far reaching transformations of society. With the advent of revolutionary manufacturing technology productivity boomed. Machines were used to spin and weave cloth, steam engines were used to provide reliable power, and industry was fed by the construction of the first railways, a great network of arteries feeding the factories. Cities grew as people shifted from agriculture to industry and commerce. Hand in hand with the growth of cities came rising levels of pollution and disease. Many people lost their jobs to the new machinery, whilst working conditions in the factories were grim and pay was low. As the middle classes prospered, social unrest ran through the working classes, and the exploitation of workers led to the growth of trade
unions and protest movements.
Books About The Future of Manufacturing
13. Makers: The New Industrial Revolution By Chris Anderson
3D Robotics co-founder and bestselling author Chris Anderson takes you to the front lines of a new industrial revolution as today’s entrepreneurs, using open source design and 3-D printing, bring manufacturing to the desktop.
In an age of custom-fabricated, do-it-yourself product design and creation, the collective potential of a million garage tinkerers and enthusiasts is about to be unleashed, driving a resurgence of American manufacturing. A generation of “Makers” using the Web’s innovation model will help drive the next big wave in the global economy, as the new technologies of digital design and rapid prototyping gives everyone the power to invent--creating “the long tail of things.”
14. Modern Manufacturing Case Studies Series: The Complete Series By Michelle Segrest
Since 2008, Michelle Segrest has been touring manufacturing facilities worldwide for major industry trade publications. She has toured more than 75 manufacturing facilities in 12 countries on three continents. Each plant made a memorable impression.
This complete 3-book series about modern manufacturing showcases the 30 factories that she felt had the most compelling stories to tell about innovation, efficiency, and reliability—with a glimpse of what the future of manufacturing looks like. Michelle shares her first-hand experiences touring manufacturing facilities worldwide, delivering the lessons learned from the best practices of industry champions.
15. Digital Supply Networks: Transform Your Supply Chain and Gain Competitive Advantage with Disruptive Technology and Reimagined Processes By Amit Sinha, Ednilson Bernardes, Rafael Calderon, and Thorsten Wuest
Digital tech has disrupted life and business as we know it, and supply chain management is no exception. But how exactly does digital transformation affect your business? What are the breakthrough technologies and their capabilities you need to know about? How will digital transformation impact skills requirements and work in general? Do you need to completely revamp your understanding of supply chain management? And most importantly: How do you get started?
Digital Supply Networks provides clear answers to these and many other questions. Written by an experienced team comprised of Deloitte consultants and leading problem-driven scholars from a premier research university, this expert guide leads you through the process of improving operations building supply networks, increasing revenue, reimagining business models, and providing added value to customers, stakeholders, and society.
16. Finding America's Greatest Champion: Building Prosperity Through Manufacturing, Mentoring and the Awesome Responsibility of Parenting By Terry Iverson
Finding America’s Greatest Champion honors people who earn their living designing, engineering, tinkering, and dreaming of making things. Iverson hopes to influence the perception of manufacturing in education, and in the minds of young people and their parents. Equally important, the book demonstrates that they have choices and that some young people can excel in manufacturing beyond their wildest dreams. Our young people also need more than ever to be mentored by leaders in our business world and industries. Not all parents and grandparents are aware of the dramatic shift that is happening in the market. The retirement of massive numbers of baby boomers has left a void in many technical positions, especially in the trades and in manufacturing positions. The need and opportunities are there for the next generation to step into and earn a great wage, in exciting and challenging careers.
17. Resource Revolution: How to Capture the Biggest Business Opportunity in a Century By Stefan Heck, Matt Rogers, and Paul Carroll
What do shale gas, Elon Musk’s Tesla, and the global apparel chain Zara share in common? In Resource Revolution, management experts Stefan Heck and Matt Rogers describe how each in its own way exemplifies a resource revolution—a use of natural resources so effective it defies conventional wisdom and enables breakthrough performance where others see only limits and shortcomings.
Resource Revolution shows how to take what is being seen as a worldwide crisis and turn it into the biggest business opportunity of the past one hundred years. The rapid urbanization of a new 2.5-billion-person middle class in Asia will create an unprecedented demand for oil, steel, land, food, water, cement, and other commodities over the next two decades. Heck and Rogers explore the ways in which innovators, including start-ups and global leaders from Cree to GE, have answered the challenge with practical steps to guide managers everywhere.
18. Making It: Why Manufacturing Still Matters By Louis Uchitelle
A veteran New York Times economics correspondent reports from factories nationwide to illustrate the continuing importance of industry.
In the 1950s, manufacturing generated nearly 30 percent of US income. But over the decades, that share has gradually declined to less than 12 percent, at the same time that real estate, finance, and Wall Street trading have grown. While manufacturing’s share of the US economy shrinks, it expands in countries such as China and Germany that have a strong industrial policy. Meanwhile Americans are only vaguely aware of the many consequences—including a decline in their self-image as inventive, practical, and effective people—of the loss of that industrial base. Making It tells the overlooked story of manufacturing’s still-vital role in the United States and how it might expand.
19. Advanced Manufacturing: The New American Innovation Policies (The MIT Press) By William B. Bonvillian and Peter L. Singer
How to rethink innovation and revitalize America's declining manufacturing sector by encouraging advanced manufacturing, bringing innovative technologies into the production process. Bonvillian and Singer discuss transformative new production paradigms that could drive up efficiency and drive down costs, describe the new processes and business models that must accompany them, and explore alternative funding methods for startups that must manufacture. They examine the varied attitudes of mainstream economics toward manufacturing, the post-Great Recession policy focus on advanced manufacturing, and lessons from the new advanced manufacturing institutes. They consider the problem of “startup scaleup,” possible new models for training workers, and the role of manufacturing in addressing “secular stagnation” in innovation, growth, the middle classes, productivity rates, and related investment.
Books About The Way Things Are Made
20. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things By Michael Baungart
A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. But as this provocative, visionary book argues, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world?
21. The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition By Don Norman
The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how -- and why -- some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.
Manufacturing Books About Workforce Management
22. Workforce Education: The Basics By Kenneth C. Gray and Edwin L. Herr
Businesses and the government are clamoring for a better-prepared workforce. The successful practice of workforce education requires practitioners to have prerequisite knowledge. This common body of knowledge is applicable to practice in all settings: industry, community colleges, high schools, etc. The purpose of this book is to provide this background. This book provides a comprehensive look at workforce education, an aspect of education which prepares individuals to be competitive in seeking employment or to improve on-the-job performance. Written with the practitioner in mind, this is the only foundations book designed for both human resource development and secondary/postsecondary technical education professionals. Employment & training services, human resources.
23. Layman's Guide to Workforce Management: A Guide to Workforce Optimization and Life-Cycle By Renju Zacharias
It's all in the title. Layman’s Guide to Workforce Management is a humble attempt to guide the path of the unlearned in the rocky terrain of Workforce management. It can be effectively said that it converts laymen into managers. It is unfortunate that these areas of business affairs have been badly presented in some learning situations, to the extent that many people consider them to be too difficult to understand or enjoy. That shouldn't be the case. The simple, explicit, detailed, and down-to-earth approach adopted in the book will no doubt help in laying a solid foundation for people at all levels.
24. Leading the Workforce of the Future: Inspiring a Mindset of Passion, Innovation and Growth By Brigette Tasha Hyacinth
Leading the Workforce of the Future mandates new levels of self-awareness. As the workplace evolves in the direction of innovation, digitalization, and rapid change, leaders must follow suit in order to remain relevant and engaging to this multigenerational workforce. This book provides concrete advice and best practices on how to engage and retain top talent. It addresses several areas to focus on to future proof yourself and your business.
Manufacturing Engineering Books
25. Lubrication Degradation Mechanisms: A Complete Guide By Sanya Mathura
In industry, owners, engineers and workers have struggled with lubricant degradation and its effects on their equipment. The purpose of Lubrication Degradation Mechanisms: A Complete Guide is to help personnel to understand the reasons behind the degradation of their lubricant, determine methods to identify the onset of degradation and reduce or eliminate lubricant degradation within their equipment.
One of the most common forms of lubricant degradation is oxidation. However, this is not the only method by which a lubricant degrades. By understanding the differences between degradation patterns, personnel can employ specific tasks / tests to aid in their identification of the type of degradation and the factors responsible. The aim of this book is to educate facility personnel on the methods of degradation and ways in which it can be reduced or eliminated while keeping an eye on the cost of operation.
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