The May 2010 publication of "Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business" by blue-hole-press was the event that transformed the Kanban Method from a community-circulated set of practices into a codified, widely teachable framework. The book sold over 40,000 copies in eight languages and became one of the top five best-selling books in the Agile category — a result that no one in the community anticipated when Anderson chose to self-publish through a personal imprint.
The book as culmination
The Kanban book was the culmination of the corbis-experiment-era: six years of empirical development at microsoft and corbis, theoretical refinement through conversations with don-reinertsen, and the beginnings of a community through the first-lean-kanban-conference in May 2009. The book synthesized all of this into a coherent, teachable account of the method — its intellectual sources (taiichi-ohno, don-reinertsen, eliyahu-goldratt, w-edwards-deming), its six core practices, its evolutionary change management approach, and its empirical grounding in the Corbis case study.
The foreword by don-reinertsen was a deliberate signal of the book's intellectual positioning: it placed the Kanban Method within the product development flow tradition rather than the Scrum/XP Agile tradition, and it validated the queueing theory foundation that Anderson had built on Reinertsen's work.
Self-publication decision
The choice to publish through blue-hole-press rather than a commercial publisher gave Anderson control over the book's content, pricing, and distribution, but also meant assuming the financial and marketing risk. The book's success demonstrated that a self-published technical book targeted at a practitioner community could achieve substantial commercial and intellectual impact — a result that influenced how other Agile and Lean practitioners approached publishing.
Consequences
The book's publication launched the community-building-era: it provided the canonical reference that made training programs, certifications, and accreditation possible; it validated the Kanban Method to organizational decision-makers who needed a credible reference; and it created the audience for the lean-kanban-inc conference series that Anderson was simultaneously building. Without the book, the community infrastructure that followed — kanban-university, the conference series, the djaa-school-of-management training programs — would have lacked a shared foundation.