It was during an agile raid, that excursion in the Cévennes to talk about agility that we had invented with Claude, that Laurent proposed to me, at the edge of the woods, to take over the next edition of his book on Kanban. My articles on the subject pleased him, I’ve known Laurent for quite a while, and we know that we get along well while being very different.
But really very different.
Very.
And I like that. We had talked about this difference by caricaturing ourselves (a bit): him the analytical, orderly left brain, me the emotional, creative right brain. And we had made a session about it at Flowcon (formerly: Lean Kanban France).
I discovered later that Laurent had tried to take on this new edition before proposing it to me, but that he lacked the strength. That he had tried to make it a collective work, but the collective has its limits sometimes. He then gave me carte blanche.
Like many, over time, I’ve grown closer to Kanban. In September 2009, with quite a bit of clumsiness, I wondered why SSI (ESN) didn’t use Kanban more versus Scrum? A topic I revisited again in 2011 seeing Kanban as a Trojan horse. But it takes time. And the time has come. That of the agile enterprise. More agnostic. For which Kanban is obvious.
This writing wasn’t easy. My articles, they surge forth, they come out of me suddenly, with a lot of energy, with crash and bang. I feed the reflection, I marinate in my juice, and suddenly, it’s expelled in a sort of convulsion. I almost never reread myself right away. I publish, then I tell myself I should reread… If it takes more than two hours to write, it’s doomed to disappear, to never appear. A book is nothing like that. You have to reread. Go back. Especially when you’re a co-author. And with two such different approaches that make it difficult, but also rich.
I went around in circles a lot. I doubted a lot. I had help from reviewers who encouraged me.
My goal was to make Kanban accessible, to have it spread, to have it do us good, everyone (must one be a great naive?). So first it was necessary to make fluid a writing I found hard (Laurent’s left brain), to fight (a bit, they’re very nice) against the publisher for a simple, clean layout. To take Kanban out of the IT collection. To remove as many sidebars as possible. To remove a big chunk of IT-related terms. I’m far from having succeeded at everything. The table of contents still seems far too dense to me to be honest.
But I have the satisfaction of a book that covers a broad spectrum: from the vacation notebook for children, through the introduction to Kanban for everyone or the evocation of the appropriate managerial posture, that of the coach too, to the most accomplished technical, analytical points that I took from previous editions where Laurent worked alone. Not everything will please everyone, but everyone should find something they like.
Happy reading.
Thank you Laurent.
Thank you Jean-Luc and Dunod.
Help me?
A little bird tells me that reader comments on online platforms are a significant plus. If you liked the book and if you want to help me, participate by writing a comment on online sites. If you didn’t like the book, might as well not make that effort too ;)
References
Kanban
The flow approach for the agile enterprise
Laurent Morisseau & Pablo Pernot
Hors collection - June 2019
272 pages; 25 x 17.5 cm; paperback
ISBN 978-2-10-078105-8
EAN 9782100781058
Where to find it
In your bookstores, mine is “page 189”, rue du Faubourg StAntoine. And otherwise “online”: