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Everything, as
people have come to discover, is better in comics. You'll note that
I use the term 'comics', not the more pretentious 'graphic novel'
that some journalists came up with to describe, quite simply, stories
told in pictures. Pictures, especially when scribbled by the right
kind of hand, inked by the appropriate person and accompanied by
the ideal script, pack a punch, and publishers all over the world
are scrambling, as we speak, to get out comics versions of literary
classics. The market may not be huge, but it is rabid, which is
to say a comics customer is likely to spend a whole lot more on
books (mostly comics) than a regular Joe buying books. That could
explain why there are comics versions of everything from The Hobbit
to Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis to a few Marlowe short stories of
Raymond Chandler to Paul Auster's City of Glass to Ray Bradbury's
short stories (Picasso Summer is far far better as a comic than
it was as a straight short story, and it was simply devastating
as one actually) weighing down some shelves in some bookshops all
over the country. The phenomenon owes much to Chennai entrepreneur
Hemu Ramaiah (she runs the Landmark chain) whose distribution company
Westland is behind much of the imports. Still, that's another tale
and one that can wait for its turn to be told.
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WARREN BUFFETT
By Ayano Morio
John Wiley & Sons
PP: 160
Price: Rs 688
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The Japanese manga (literally, random pictures) has done for comics
what the Impressionist school did for painting. Conservative readers
may find the style a tad dystopian; then, conservative types are
rarely going to be caught reading a comic book. It isn't just sex,
gratuitous violence, technology, or urban angst that manga deals
with; it also deals with the world of business. There's, of course,
the well-known manga about Carlos Ghosn, the gaijin who turned around
a Japanese auto company. Now, John Wiley & Sons thinks the format
global enough (it is, actually) to warrant the release of an English
translation of a Japanese comic on Warren Buffett, the Oracle of
Omaha, by Ayano Morio, a Japanese comics writer/illustrator. She's
no Mike Mignola (remember Hellboy?) and the book, simply called
Warren Buffett isn't manga manga, but it will do. Deriving from
several books on Buffett-the list includes some books in Japanese,
including Investment Planning Manga-Morio weaves a compelling story
in pictures interspersed with nursery-school-style-charts on Buffett's
investing logic. It is also a great deal less hagiographical in
nature than other biographies of the man.
This reviewer's recommendation: pick up the
book if you are interested in stocks, Buffett, or comics (in that
order). Warren Buffett will not tell you any more or any less about
the man than any other biography of the man, but you can get through
it in less than 45 minutes, which should be the mandated length
for any work of non-fiction. Ayano Morio, may your tribe increase!
-R. Sukumar
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JOURNEY TO LEAN
By John Drew, Blair McCallum and Stefan Roggenhofer
Palgrave Macmillan
PP: 206
Price: Rs 1,822.50
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In the hyper-competitive
market of today, corporations employ a variety of tricks to stay
ahead in the game. Some rely on branding, others on the strength
of their product, and yet others on pricing or customer service.
But manufacturing companies have their fates sealed much ahead of
the marketplace. That happens on the shopfloor. Just about everything-brand
premium, price advantage, customer satisfaction, indeed, profitability-is
determined by how well their shopfloor performs. One company figured
this out early on and has gone on to become the most valuable player
in the global automotive industry. That company is Toyota Motor
Corporation of Japan. At the heart of Toyota's success is something
called the Toyota Production System, which, once discovered by the
West, got labelled as 'lean manufacturing'. Why did it get called
lean? Simply because, as the West learnt to its amazement, the system
involved weeding out waste from the system and using less of everything
every day: men, materials, machines, and money.
Ever since Toyota let the cat out of the bag,
hordes of companies around the world have tried to emulate it. But
none of them has been as successful as Toyota. Why is that? That's
what the three authors, all McKinsey consultants, attempt to answer
in Journey to Lean. As the title of the book indicates, lean is
not so much about technique as mindset. It's well and truly a journey
down a tough terrain, where companies face seemingly insurmountable
odds but must persevere and prevail all the same. Most importantly,
though, the top management must commit itself to the lean journey.
If you are a lean practitioner and unhappy
with your progress, then this book, which has case studies from
several industries, may help you do a quick self-audit to figure
out where you are going wrong and how to set it right.
-R. Sridharan
 Stefan
Roggenhofer, principal, McKinsey
& Co. and co-author of Journey To Lean, tells BT's Priyanka
Sangani what 'lean' really is. Excerpts from an interview:
What would you say 'lean' is fundamentally
about? Why aren't others as successful as Toyota?
People tend to focus on the technical elements
of Toyota like 'Just In Time', not all of them. You have to include
all elements. Infrastructure is equally important, as are organisational
structure-building capability. And the people dimension cannot be
ignored. How they behave, their attitude. We make three points in
the book-the difference between the tool-based approach and system
design approach, and that transforming an organisation into lean
is a big endeavour, and not a marginal change. Most automotive companies
claim to follow lean, but Toyota is as valuable as three to four
of its competitors put together. This is because (the others) haven't
fully understood the systems design aspect or how to get people
to work in a certain (the required) way.
How do I know if I am truly a lean company?
The best way to know if you are lean is to look
at the mindsets of the people in the organisation. In most organisations,
it is only the executives who would be able to help with the problem
solving, but in a lean organisation even the operations staff will
say that we are here to solve your problem and help you.
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