Mike Rother's influential book on the behavioral patterns (kata) that underlie TPS. Published by McGraw-Hill, 2009. Based on six years of research into Toyota's employee-management routines.
Rother argues that the visible tools of TPS (kanban, andon, value stream maps) are outputs of an underlying way of thinking and acting — the "improvement kata" (a repeating four-step pattern of understanding the challenge, grasping the current condition, establishing a target condition, and experimenting toward the target) and the "coaching kata" (how managers develop this capability in others). This framework directly addresses the gap between adopting lean tools and achieving lean culture — the challenge that defeated many Western lean implementations. Rother's work builds on taiichi-ohno's teaching method: asking questions rather than giving answers, developing people through guided experimentation at the gemba.