If your team is involved in providing services or product to “clients” and you want to learn to continuously improve and to delight those clients, I highly recommend the book, Radical Management by Stephen Denning. This book applies equally well to small teams, micro-business, not-for-profit, and larger corporate entities. It offers a repeatable and scalable approach.

Denning has put into one package a number of the project / program management techniques I use in my consulting practice. He discusses seven basic principles:

• Focus work on delighting the “client”
• Do work through self-organizing teams
• Do work in “client”-driven iterations
• Deliver value to “clients” in each iteration
• Be totally open about impediments to improvement
• Create a context for continuous self-improvement by the team
• Communicate interactively: stories, questions, conversations

And then does a good job of describing the practices under each one and showing how they relate to many different contexts, both commercial and not-for-profit (i.e., it is not just for business J)

He does a great job combining stories, theory, and specific practices.

I put this on my bookshelf right next to Michael Gerber’s E-Myth Revisited (also highly recommended).

Learning to delight more.