Marketing with A3 Book Release

Sales and Marketing not only needs to improve but must improve their problem solving skills. The book, Marketing with A3 is the introduction needed. It enables sales and marketing to use the Lean tool of A3 as a template or structured approach for their strategies and tactics. It will also demonstrate meaningful and measurable results of their activities. You will enter meetings armed with facts and profound knowledge of sales and marketing efforts. As a result, you will engage in more meaningful conversations. It will require a different approach. The dialogue is sometimes not easy. But seldom is any improvement.

Using a structured approach, such as the Lean thinking tool of A3, the mind remains open, enabling one to examine each element of the decision or problem separately or systematically, and sufficiently, ensuring that all alternatives are considered. The outcome is almost always more comprehensive and more effective than the instinctive approach.

Visit the Marketing with A3 Website

Sample A3s

A3 Podcasts

A3 Community

A3 Experts

Amazon Links

A3 for Special Causes – Lean for Haiti

January 12, 2010 marked the one year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti. A fellow Lean Blogger, Mark Graban of http://leanblog.org was fortunate to meet a special person - Russell Maroni, an x-ray tech at Akron Children's Hospital. He volunteered in Haiti for 15 days in February 2010 as part of the earthquake relief efforts. He was unexpectedly, and necessarily, pressed into service in a medical role, not only caring for patients, but also using his formal lean training from ACH to help improve processes and radiology patient throughput at a field hospital. This is a copy of Russell’s A3 Report, click on the picture to view a pdf of the full size A3.

Mark said in a letter to me last week: 

Russell wrote a very compelling, and very personal, journal during his time in Haiti. He and his colleagues took many pictures. They are sharing this all in a PDF eBook that they are freely distributing - to share the story and to create awareness for Haiti relief needs. They are asking people who read the book to consider donating to the Friends of the Orphans, which runs an orphanage in Haiti.

The journal isn't mainly a "lean story," although it does include his hand-drawn A3 plan. It's a very personal story, of his own prayer and contemplation of the trip, and his experiences in the midst of that tragedy.

I hope you will consider spreading the word about this project to your readers and/or listeners - on blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, radio, etc. Please feel free to forward this email to others you think might help.

To read more, go to http://www.LeanForHaiti.org, which has links to the PDF and our social media sites. If you have ideas for helping promote this, to hopefully make it "viral" in the Lean community, please let me know. We can kaizen the site and the book itself if you have suggestions, if there are defects, or if anything is unclear (especially on the website - a work in progress).

If you can help support this online, please share a link to any blog posts, etc. and I'll list you and your site on the "Supporters of This Project" page on our site. If you have any questions, please let me know. This is purely a volunteer effort on Russell's part and mine. We need all of the free marketing help we can get for this very good cause.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

Mark

Related information: www.leanforhaiti.org

Lean Marketers should read Radical Management

Steve Denning has written an excellent book and portrayed using Lean and Agile techniques to the practice of management. Many of his thoughts parallel mine though I am only viewing these techniques from a sales and marketing perspective. His seven principles depicted below make perfect sense to me. The book is well written, researched and referenced. However, I am not sure the traditional agile people will find anything in the book new or earth shattering though they may see how well they have developed agile into a true management philosophy.

Radical management is a way of organizing and managing work that leads to high productivity, deep job satisfaction, continuous innovation and client delight. It is discussed in Steve Denning's new book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century, published by Jossey-Bass in October 2010.

What are the seven principles of radical management? The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management describes seven basic principles of continuous innovation, along with more than seventy supporting practices. Radical management is a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter-locking principles.

1. The goal of work is to delight clients. Radical management aims at delighting clients and focuses, not just the marketing department, but the entire organization on this goal.
2. Work is conducted in self-organizing teams. Self-organizing teams draw on the full talents and inspiration of the people doing the work.
3. Teams operate in client-driven iterations. Client-driven iterations are key, because delighting clients can only be approached through successive approximations.
4. Each iteration delivers value to clients. Client-driven iterations focus on delivering value to clients by the end of each iteration. This forces closure and enables frequent client feedback.
5. Managers foster radical transparency. Self-organizing teams—working in an iterative fashion—in turn both enable and require radical transparency.
6. Managers nurture continuous self-improvement. Continuous improvement means having the entire work force find better ways to give value to clients.
7. Managers communicating interactively, through stories, questions and conversations. An underlying requirement of all of these principles is interactive communication. Unless managers and workers are communicating interactively, using authentic narratives, open-ended questions and deep listening, rather than treating people as things to be manipulated, none of the above works.

P.S. What do think of this Hitchcock movie?

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Rehearsing your next Sales Call, why not?

At the Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play -- with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn't).

Tim Brown is the CEO of innovation and design firm IDEO, taking an approach to design that digs deeper than the surface. Having taken over from founder David E. Kelley, Tim Brown carries forward the firm's mission of fusing design, business and social studies to come up with deeply researched, deeply understood designs and ideas -- they call it "design thinking."

One thing that I have been encouraging lately is role playing. Since we have become a service society our product has become us. Have you ever videotaped or just talked into your webcam to see how you looked and sounded? Technology has made it so easy and  at practically no cost. The benefits of a rehearsal can make all the difference. 

How about role playing an issues they were having with your service team? Getting a few actors from your local college to role play for you could be a lot fun in a training session. Think about developing ways to mimic the problems your customer faces. If nothing else, you could be putting yourself in their shoes – not a bad idea at all!

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Adding Customer Value in Development at Xerox

This Business901 Podcast featured Patrick Waara talking about Xerox’s use of Agile techniques. Pat has been with Xerox for nearly 25 years teaching Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile techniques to Xerox's software development community improving out software development capability. Our conversation originally was designed to discuss swarming and Lean problem solving. However we ventured off into the subject of how Lean, Six Sigma and Agile all work under the same umbrella. If you are regular listener or reader of this blog, you will see the humor in his answer: “It’s all about the Value Flow for the Customer.”

Our conversations started based on this recent news release from Xerox:

2010 swarming in action:

Recently, Xerox leveraged the Agile Scrum process – a light-weight project management system – during the development of the WorkCentre® 7545 and WorkCentre 7556, which were announced today (release below). By hosting live, frequent discussions on progress and priorities, the WorkCentre team was able to:

• Identify and obtain all resources necessary to launch the product on time.
• Balance the workload of team members who were juggling other projects.
• Enable problem solving success in a team of people who had never worked together before.

  Whether you call it swarming or Agile, real-time collaboration may become more sophisticated by 2020, but it’s already happening today and building competitive advantages for companies that can harness its power. I’d be happy to arrange a briefing for you with a Xerox Lean Six Sigma executive to discuss how through Agile methods companies can benefit from the “swarming” technique of problem solving. Please let me know if you’re interested.

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Pat has both a BS and an MS in computer science from Michigan Technological University.  He has held a variety of jobs at Xerox including developing user interface systems for Xerox's DocuTech and Systems Architect for Xerox's iGen3, all dealing with software development and systems.  

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How do you know when you are you not getting your point across?

Do you think that some ground work should have been laid before they got to this discussion. Always remember your biggest challenge in sales is usually clarity.  Make sure your prospects are ready for higher math before taking them there. It’s not their fault for not understanding. It’s yours. Right pop?

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The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota

I have to preface this as saying that this is pure conjecture on how to sell to Toyota. I have no product or client at this time considering doing this. If you do have a product or service that would like to try this approach, please feel free to contact me. My door is open.

I would like to thank co-authors Jeffrey Liker and David Meir, co-authors of The Toyota Way Fieldbook where this material was derived from. The co-authors discussed the Supplier Partnering Hierarchy of Toyota that consisted of 7 steps:

One of the first steps in Lean Marketing is to understand the customers buying process. Mapping this out and detail and defining the resources, people, budget and marketing collateral to match each of these steps is imperative. This exercise can save you a tremendous amount of time and money in just determining if you are ready to attempt this undertaking. Selling to a company like Toyota could be a complete marketing channel in itself.

Toyota’s first step in the process is Mutual Understanding. They base this on the key elements of trust, mutual prosperity, respect for each other’s capability and Genchi gembutsu (actual part, actual place). Till we achieve this in our sales and marketing efforts there is little reason to proceed. We will stay in that first iterative PDCA loop till we achieve their respect and they invite us to the next step, interlocking structures.

Our sales and marketing efforts should go through the planning, do, check and act stages to achieve each of the key elements as defined. In the act stage we will arrive at a control to see if they are indications that Toyota is interested in initiating discussion about an alliance structure, interdependent processes and parallel sourcing. If there is no interest we must continue our efforts in another cycle of gaining mutual understanding. At some point and time, such as Seth Godin discussed in The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) , you must decide to quit or continue on.

I hate to make it sound this simple. Of course understanding what Toyota means by trust may not be. But I think you would be surprised that it really is not that difficult as long as you do not get the cart ahead of the horse. The authors go on to lay out this chart describing the key elements of each partnering characteristic. I believe your marketing should facilitate the decision making process of the customer. As you create your material, presentations, etc. each one should fulfill the need of that step in process and nothing more. Using the thought process of MVP, minimum viable product will allow you to respond quicker and more accurately to their needs. More than this will complicate your message and may reduce the likelihood of gaining acceptance. More interactions, increase face time with a customer is a winning proposition.

Mimicking the customer buying process is at the heart of Lean Marketing and more specifically the Value Stream Marketing concepts. This marketing channel or Value Stream would equate to one of the pillars in the Lean Marketing House. The pillars are built with the iterative PDCA loops as depicted in the drawing above. As you build the relationship with the customer the cycles typically get smaller and faster. In Toyota’s and many others companies when you reach the top of the pyramid, you start sharing PDCA cycles.

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Lean enough to have A3 thinking?

I was looking for a primer on A3 to include in my blog and found this IW Best Plants Conference: Developing People with A3 Thinking: In this session at the 2009 IW Best Plants Conference, Jamie Flinchbaugh, Founder and Partner, Lean Learning Center provides a basic primer on A3, outlining its use as a method to structure, capture, communicate and coach. In this clip, Flinchbaugh draws a picture to illustrate the background of A3.

This is a video excerpt, to see the full video, please go to http://www.industryweek.com/videos/a3-Thinking-flinchbaugh-Best-Plants-2009.aspx

Industry Week’s description of the video:

A3 thinking" has become popular within the lean community, but not necessarily for all the right reasons. A3 Reports are simply a waste-free way for report writing and communication, but the basic building blocks of the A3 report provide a nice template for good thinking. In this session, Jamie Flinchbaugh provides a basic primer on A3, outlining its use as a method to structure, capture, communicate and coach. He discusses each of its components in greater depth, beginning with how to develop the problem statement and continuing through to verification and action. Learn tips and tricks to make the A3 a more effective learning tool in their own continuous improvement efforts.

Another resource was the podcast Problem Solving really the Core of Lean Implementation that I had earlier this year this year with Tracey Richardson.

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Discussion on NLP Techniques and Principles

Tom MacKay of MacKay NLP Solutions believes we can Follow the right steps and Achieve the Life of our Dreams and that’s what we discussed during this Business901 podcast. This is a transcription of that podcast.

Discussion on NLP Techniques and Principles

Tom MacKay is the founder of MacKay Solutions. Tom first trained as a psychologist and in NLP in 1990 and since then  has become one of the most respected NLP  trainers in the UK. Tom is a Master Trainer of NLP, the highest level that can  be attained, and is the only INLPTA Master Coach Trainer in the UK. He has appeared on television on the BBC show “Pay Off Your  Mortgage” and recently filmed a pilot show on family dynamics.

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How long should your meeting be?

Have you always wondered why your problem solving meetings failed before they even started? Did you ever think the actual time that you needed or do you just do it for experience or do you just pick the time slot available?

Most Continuous Improvement, Lean experts know the answer but I am not sure that they translate it into action. If you are holding a Kaizen Event, Value Stream Mapping Session or just working on an A3, we know that 50% of the time should be spent on the Planning side or the big “P” as in PDCA. The problem you have is do you really understand how to schedule that from a time perspective? Well a recent podcast guest of mine, Edward Muzio of Group Harmonics has a great tip on how to use the hourglass principle to help.

How to solve a problem in a group setting during a solution-oriented meeting. Referenced in Chapter 8 of Make Work Great. Amazon Link: Make Work Great: Super Charge Your Team, Reinvent the Culture, and Gain Influence One Person at a Time

If you use Ed’s philosophy in scheduling, you see how that would improve your time management.  Even during the meeting you can make adjustments, know when to take breaks and so on.

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Marketers must understand the systems they manage.

During the past several years, I have seen more marketing efforts geared towards increasing prospects at the top of the marketing funnel. This has resulted in increase spending, greater efforts in innovation and jumping on the Social Media bandwagon. Few will attribute greater profits or increased revenue to these efforts. My contention is that the top of the funnel is the least effective and most expensive method of generating leads. All of these methods will increase variation and can be demonstrated by Deming's funnel experiment which illustrates the effects of "tampering" with a process and increasing variation rather than decreasing it.

Video courtesy of Rumba Training Ltd -

It is not enough in this day and age to just increase marketing efforts. The reason the pellets miss the target is because of the inherent errors or causes built into the system. Attending to you Value Stream (Marketing Funnel) will decrease variability and create significant improvements. Why would you need to take the riskier methods of innovation and product improvements?

This is were many think that I would discuss the typical Lean theories of reducing waste, improving cycle time, and managing your work in process. Though that is not a bad thing to do but you have to innovate and improve or you will fall behind.

This is what the new wave of Lean Marketing solves. It is an effective way of staying on the leading edge. It is a way improving the way you sell and market through tightening those inherent errors in your system. You cannot predict the future. However, you can build a process that adapts quickly to the changing environment and quicker than you competition. The Future of marketing is Lean!

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Create a Great Workplace eBook

Ed Muzio, president and CEO of Group Harmonics was my guest on the Business901 Podcast. This is a transcription of the podcast, Creating a Great Workplace. We had a great discussion on his new book,  Make Work Great: Super Charge Your Team, Reinvent the Culture, and Gain Influence One Person at a Time. He is a leader in the application of analytical models to group effectiveness and individual enjoyment. I thought  it was a must listen for Kaizen Leaders and participants. Ed gives some great tips and tools that can be instantly implemented. I was very impressed on his ease of explanation and mastery of the subject.

Creating a Great Workspace -

Ed is also the author of the award-winning book Four Secrets to Liking Your Work: You May Not Need to Quit to Get the Job You Want (FT Press, 2008).

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Approach to Innovation used by Disney

Innovation requires a balance between ideas and reality. In this segment Ed Muzio describes a method of keeping those two competing elements in balance to create new, innovative ideas. Ed uses an approach developed by Walt Disney and based on the roles of Dreamer, Realist and Critic. In the video are some great tips on how to put this into practice. I once read that Walt could play all the roles and many times when he walked into meetings everyone wondered which role he was going to take on. He also experimented with having separate rooms for each role. This approach should be considered when creating the future state during a Value Stream Mapping Session.

Ed Muzio, president and CEO of Group Harmonics was a guest on the Business901 podcast, Creating a Great Workplace. During the podcast, he discussed several more innovative ideas in transforming your workplace. He has just recently published a new book Make Work Great: Super Charge Your Team, Reinvent the Culture, and Gain Influence One Person at a Time.

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