Customer Reviews

Ready, Set, Dominate: Implement Toyota's Set-based Learning for Developing Products and Nobody Can Catch You

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This is the second of Kennedy's books and, like the first, most of it's in the form of a business novel. Those familiar with product development in Western firms will find all of the characters familiar - sometimes painfully so.

What sets the new book apart is inclusion of two powerful case studies of committed implementation of set-based (problem solving/knowledge-based) product development. Tellingly, both case study firms were not experimenting with this approach, their senior executives were committed to making it work. The results have been spectacular and compelling.

In a nutshell: Kennedy is selling something valuable. Like a good salesman, his first book Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota's System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It conveys his sympathy for how you FEEL the pain and shows how he's FELT it, too (from years in U.S. aerospace/high tech firms). This book's case studies explain what he's FOUND to really solve those problems.

Eventually I saw the light ... after having been reading books on Toyota Product Development I strongly recommend this book to clarify the concepts of knowledge management beside the big successes of Lean PD. I suggest reading this book with his kennedy's companion and with the book of Allen Ward Lean Product and Process Development by LEI. Only one remark, there is a strong need of clear Knowledge Brief or A3 report examples and the book does not cover very well. Neverthless it is really worth reading.

Read the previous books. This book seems to move slow. The concepts are good. However, it takes a while to get to the meat.