Sense and respond

is an excellent book by Susan Barlow, Stephen Parry, and Mike Faulkner (isbn 1-4039-4573-X). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Continuous improvement… is not enough… what is needed also is continuous value creation.

…they continue to create products 'just in case' rather than 'just in time'.

The intelligent business therefore embraces voluntary evolution, designing its own fitness to survive and thrive.

...measure the value creation to value restoration ratio.

Most fast-food burger chains follow, to a large extent, the batch-and-queue principle… Contrast this kind of flow with the one-piece flow achieved by another fast-food company that makes sandwiches and 'subs'… What has been standardised therefore, is not the product but the production method...

Very often the traditional organisation passes work from one department to another in a batch-and-queue system, and with this approach it is not atypical to discover that a task that could be done in ten minutes may actually take ten days to complete. The reason for this is simple: the process is designed that way.

Working together in a cross-functional way actually joins up the company, as well as reinforcing and strengthening the value chain.

Two options exist for businesses: to make offers to customers or to respond to customers' needs.

Is the customer purchasing an electric drill or holes in the wall?

Adaptiveness… cannot just be added on to an organisation's existing capabilities: the organisation itself must become adaptive.

Working together in a cross-functional way actually joins up the company, as well as reinforcing and strengthening the value chain. The result is a critical mass of value creation around flow instead of around functions.