The Best Design & Production Books

The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List

2008 Edition: Revised and Updated

Top MBA programs don't have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work. The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List features only the very best business books available, based on thousands of hours of research. So skip b-school and the $100,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.

About This Category:

The Design & Production category will help you create and commercialize new products and services. The books in this category will teach you:

How to research, test, and qualify product ideas.
How to make good design choices.
How to produce and improve your product over time.

Product Design and Development by Karl Ulrich and Steven Eppinger

Have an idea for a new product or service? This book will help you make it a reality.

Creating and producing new products is a complex, important, and fascinating part of business, and Product Design and Development is the best comprehensive resource available.

In this text, Ulrich and Eppinger cover the most essential aspects of creating new products: project planning and management, resource allocation, consumer research, product specifications, concept generation / selection / testing, product architecture, design and aesthetics, prototyping, manufacturing, protecting intellectual property, financial modeling, and project evaluation.

If you have an idea you want to bring into the world, be sure to pick up Product Design and Development: it will give you a realistic overview of the entire design and development process, as well as help you avoid common mistakes.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

Products and services don't exist in a vacuum: they're created by and for people. The Design of Everyday Things describes how designers can successfully create products that actually meet the needs of the end user.

A cognitive scientist by background, Norman is an advocate of what he calls "User-Centered Design": the process of designing from the perspective of the people who will actually be using the product. Through the use of hundreds of examples, you'll learn a great deal about how people actually interact with the objects around them, learn how to use new tools, and figure out what to do next when things don't work as expected.

The Design of Everyday Things is a broad introduction to the role design plays in our daily lives, a primer in how to notice good and bad design in the world around you, and a set of principles that will help you use your imagination, intuition, and experience to create products and services people enjoy using.

Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler

For me, the primary purpose of reading business books is discovering new mental models: foundational concepts that teach you how to understand a wide variety of situations. That's why I love this book.

In little more than 200 pages, Universal Principles of Design explains a wide variety of foundational design concepts, including performance load, Occam's Razor, and the product adoption life-cycle.

Superbly illustrated and thoroughly explained, this text provides a detailed summary of over 100 mental models that relate to the design process. Each principle is explained in two pages, complete with visual examples and references to other texts for further study.

Whenever you're stuck with a design issue, need inspiration, or want to improve an existing design, pick up Universal Principles of Design.

Getting Real by 37signals

Design is ultimately about making choices, and in order to make good choices, you must know exactly what you want. Your personal design philosophy will impact every aspect of your work, so it's best to identify it as explicitly as possible.

37signals is a small firm in Chicago that specializes in creating web applications for small businesses like Backpack, Basecamp, and Highrise. In Getting Real, the programmers and designers behind 37signals share their philosophy: stay small, embrace constraints, and build less.

In Getting Real, you'll learn why features are overrated; why taking outside funding should be your last resort; why staying small and flexible is preferable to growing a company quickly; why constant iteration is important; and why real prototypes are always better than design documents.

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the specific design philosophy 37signals details in Getting Real, you'll find it very useful as you develop your own.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu Goldratt

The best way to learn about a subject is to observe a person while they're living it. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement is not a traditional business book: it’s a novel about Alex Rogo, a plant manager whose factory is on the brink of being closed.

As the story progresses, Goldratt and Cox use each event to teach you about operations management, systems thinking, asking good questions, analyzing constraints, managerial decision-making, and the inherently human nature of business. You'll be privy to Rogo's thoughts, questions, and hardships as he discovers that the way to save his plant is by abandoning outdated concepts and adopting new ways of thinking.

Aside from the the concepts, The Goal is very engaging and memorable, which helps to reinforce the information presented in the book. Goldratt's "Theory of Constraints" would be easy to forget if presented in a more academic format, but watching it work makes it hard to forget. Who knew running a factory could be so captivating?

Lean Thinking by James Womack and Daniel Jones

In a few short decades, Toyota surpassed its competitors to become the largest and most successful automotive manufacturer in the world. This book is about how they did it.

Lean Thinking is an in-depth look at the core principles behind the Toyota Production System, one of the most efficient and streamlined manufacturing operations in history.

This book will teach you the basic concepts of lean production, as created and practiced by Toyota. You'll discover how to think like your customer, complete a value stream analysis of current operations, eliminate wasteful activities, build flexibility into your operations, and build a culture that relentlessly pursues operational perfection.

Lean Thinking is a great conceptual overview of lean production principles. Understanding the subtle power of continuous improvement will help you improve the operations of any business, large or small.