Product Review

This Shingo Award winning book is written for executives, managers, supervisors, team leaders, and coaches, providing a robust discussion of visual principles and practices, based on 30 years of field work by the author, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth. As world-renowned author Richard Schonberger writes: "In this book Galsworth, the foremost visual workplace authority, raises the stature of visuality, hardens soft notions about it, and embeds it in structure and theory." The goal of the book is to establish visual thinking as a foremost methodology for continuous improvement, and how to attain this by creating a workforce of visual thinkers. Over 200 full-color images and examples are shared. The first section of the book targets the basic concepts of visual information sharing, the use of visuality as a common language, and the Eight Building Blocks of Visual Thinking. Section 2 focuses on the culture of work: the role of executives, the leadership paradigm, and the empowerment inversion that results in a deeply engaged, spirited, inventive, and aligned workforce. Sections 3 and 4 map out the Ten Doorways of a Visual Workplace: visual order, visual standards, displays, visual metrics, visual problem solving, visual leadership, visual controls, visual pull systems, and visual guarantees (poka-yoke devices). In the final chapter, Galsworth discusses the visual and lean paradigms and how to bring them into the alignment needed to achieve operational excellence and make it sustainable.