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Here are some choice articles from the business schools and the business press to start off your work week. I'm pointing you to articles about Toyota, workplace diversity, leadership lessons from a pizza maker, management involvement in process improvement, and engaging with customers.

From Three Star Leadership: Special Toyota Edition
"Toyota has been a successful company for almost a century. Now they're facing their biggest crisis since the end of World War II. Here are four select articles to help you get your head around the Toyota crisis."

Wally's Comment: Toyota is the big story of the week, so I've put the best articles about their current crisis in a special edition.

From INSEAD: Diversity in the workplace: how it affects the bottom line
"Be it male-female or multi-cultural, diversity is an offshoot of today’s global economy, the workforce more and more reflecting society’s make-up. But with unemployment having increased since the economic crisis, corporate diversity targets - in the developed world, at least- are in jeopardy, with the remaining workforce left largely unmotivated, disillusioned, and prepared to jump ship at the next job offer. How can companies cope? And can maintaining workforce diversity be an asset or a liability to the bottom line in this environment?"

Wally's Comment: The strength of this article is the discussion of bottom line impact.

From Inc: Lessons from a Blue-Collar Millionaire
"When Nick Sarillo launched his pizza business, he had one goal in mind: to create a corporate culture unlike any he had seen."

Wally's Comment: Does culture matter? Can you really beat the performance of the industry? Think about this one statistic from the article: 20 percent. That's the turnover at Nick Sarillo's pizza restaurants. For most pizza places turnover is about ten times that.

From HBS Working Knowledge: Going through the Motions: An Empirical Test of Management Involvement in Process Improvement
"How can managers better lead their organizations to improve work processes? Describing their study of hospitals over an 18-month period, HBS professor Anita L. Tucker and Harvard School of Public Health professor Sara J. Singer detail how and why managers' taking action was more effective than their communicating about actions taken. Findings suggest, first, that taking action on known problems in specific work areas on at least a quarterly basis may improve the organizational climate for improvement. Second, the study indicates that managers would be well advised to take action-preferably substantive and intense action-in response to frontline workers' communications about problems. Overall, the research provides insight for senior managers who want to improve their organization's climate for process improvement."

Wally's Comment: Guess what? One message from this research is that it's a bad idea to try to con your employees. If they're good enough to keep, then they're smart enough to know when you're full of beans, or something else.

From Industry Week: Cozy Up to Customers
"Employee engagement with clients fosters a sense of worker pride and ownership."

Wally's Comment: Workers in a manufacturing plant engaging with customers? Yep. It can happen. When it does, other good things, like profit and innovation tend to happen, too.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.