I just finished reading The Power of Impossible Thinking by Jerry Wind and Colin Crook.  Really an eye-opener.  Drawing on the latest neuroscientific research and their experience with corporate transformations, Jerry Wind and Colin Crook explain how your mental models stand between you and reality, distorting all your perceptions…and how they create both limits and opportunities.

Some key points and excerpts that are especially relevant to the Lean transformation process:

How to See Differently

Most of the time we ignore so much of the world around us. We walk through the world and don’t pay attention to it. We classify new ideas as “crazy” and don’t give them a second thought. How do you cultivate the ability to see things differently?

Listen to the Radicals

You need to be able to listen, as IBM did, to the radicals and look for the wisdom and opportunities within their “bizarre” ideas.  Who are the radicals in your world and what are they saying to you? What are they seeing that you don’t see? What can you learn from them? Is there some wisdom in their ideas, and how can you bring it into your life in a way that won’t appear quite so bizarre to those around you?

Embark on Journeys of Discovery

It is not just where you go but how you see the experience that counts.  Darwin would have been merely a tourist had he not recorded and thought deeply about his new adventures.  Journeys that could offer new ways of looking at the world might be into new lands but also could be into areas such youth markets or video gaming. Listening to the emerging segments of consumers, employees and investors can offer fresh perspectives on your organization or industry.

Look Across Disciplines

Part of your own familiar territory is your education and training, and you can make new discoveries when you cross these borders. Education and training create communities that have an approved way of seeing and understanding the world. This shared view makes it easier for community members to work together.

After reading this book you will start to look at the world in a whole new way!

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Blink, has made me ponder the role that intuitive quick decision-making plays in effective leadership. 

At the heart of the book is the idea that snap judgments — even apparently instinctual, gut reactions — are accurate.  It’s what cognition experts call "thin-slicing," which Gladwell defines as "the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience."  So, as Gladwell notes in several telling anecdotes, an art expert can look at an apparently genuine ancient sculpture and know it’s a fake.  Or a relationship expert can judge whether a couple has a chance at success by studying their faces for a few minutes.

He cites a number of examples of people who have learned how to isolate and then minimize the smallest slice upon which they can base a decision and expect it to be correct with a sufficiently high degree of certainty. These people are experts in their fields, and are able to make extremely accurate decisions with far less information than we might expect.

Effective leadership, or experienced-based luck?  One of Gladwell’s New Yorker colleagues, James Surowiecki, wrote a book last year about collective wisdom, The Wisdom of Crowds.  At first glance, the theories presented in Surowiecki’s book appear to run counter to the material in "Blink." His book deals with the often inexpert conclusions of a group; Gladwell’s talks about the instinctive reaction of the individual.  The two had an open discussion about their works in Slate.com.  Gladwell says they’re really not so different after all.  Both draw from experience — even unconscious experience — and both make use of thought processes not given enough credit.

Highly effective leadership is often about knowing the least amount of information required to make a highly accurate decision… quickly.  Through "Blink" perhaps we now have a better understanding of how it happens.

Bob Emiliani’s Better Thinking, Better Results continues to be one of my favorite reads on creating enterprise excellence.  Oftentimes I’ll start a new lean transformation consulting gig by giving the leadership staff copies, sometimes with notes on specific sections directly applicable to their organization. 

As with Womack’s Lean Thinking, you will find new insight each additional time you read the book.  The president of one of the top lean transformation consulting companies recently told me that he wished he could write a book of that caliber.

Using a detailed case study of Wiremold’s transformation as the backdrop, Emiliani discusses issues such as the kaizen culture, leadership characteristics, customer-focused product development, lean accounting, and the implementation of the whole array of lean tools.  The combination of real-world case analysis with detail on those tools thereby creates an authoritative and practical lean implementation manual to guide you on your transformation journey.