Primarily an instructional manual for the DMAIC method, the Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbok is not a book that is going to add any knowledge to an experienced quality resource as many reviews state, but it is a very good tool for teaching new CPI resources.

It’s a great book to hand out to every participant in a class, or your business unit. For most topics of process improvement there is an equivalent area of the Toolbook that I can first refer to before going into the main material. I have an established nightly reading plan that will take a participant through the entire book in the course of a two-week introductory CPI class. I teach some topics entirely from the Toolbook, for example, C&E Matrix and DoE. There are some key concept pages that we turn to and read together, for example, page 70 Types of Data, page 118 Types of Variation. The section on hypothesis testing provides some very good plain language descriptions of the basic concepts that help people get through the initial learning. I am on my third copy where I coil bind and add tabs for quick reference. I carry this book wherever I go when teaching or working on CPI projects; there are almost daily opportunities to open it and discuss some aspect of CPI. If I were to change anything about the book, I would make it flow in more of a DMAIC fashion with some additional information about the use of the tools in the context of a project. There is a section that does this to some extent, but somewhat general. Many minor typos remain in the book from the first edition, but no technical errors that I have found. The PDF version that has been around for some time is not formatted very well, with page breaks in the wrong locations and tables not converting well.