Business901 Book Specials from other authors on Amazon

Saturday, June 25, 2011

IS Kaizen part of Standard Work?

The Friday Video Series continues with Dr. Michael Balle, the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute. This series of videos has a central theme of Kaizen. This particular video focuses on using Kaizen as part of standard work.

Dr. Balle is a multiple Shingo Prize winner as an author of the The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager. His newest Shingo Prize was on the adaption of The Gold Mine: A Novel of Lean Turnaround to an audiobook that features performances by multiple readers who bring its realistic business story and characters to life.

Dr. Michael Balle is the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute

Related Information:
Is Standard Work needed in Sales and Marketing?
Lean Thinking Perspectives from Dr. Michael Balle
A Gemba Talk with Womack on Lean
Kaizen

Friday, June 24, 2011

Service Design Thinking

I recently finished the book, This is Service Design Thinking: Basics - Tools – Cases and I found it to be the best reference manual so far on this contemporary approach for service innovation. I thought they did an excellent job of documenting the latest material on the methodology. If I had one complaint, I found it difficult to get any continuity to the reading of the material. I attribute this to the the number of contributors they had for the book: 23 different international authors.

Below is the video on the book:

This is Service Design Thinking introduces an inter-disciplinary approach to designing services. Service design is a bit of a buzzword these days and has gained a lot of interest from various fields. This book, assembled to describe and illustrate the emerging field of service design, was brought together using exactly the same co-creative and user-centred approaches you can read and learn about inside. The boundaries between products and services are blurring and it is time for a different way of thinking: this is service design thinking.

Related Posts:
What’s behind Collaboration and Value Networks?
Pair Problem Solving in the Workplace
Business Processes as Value Networks
The Role of PDCA in a Lean Sales and Marketing Cycle

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Quit Brainstorming and start Q-Storming®

We talk about asking good questions all the time and few of us receive little if any training in questioning. Recently, I have devoted much of my free time to this subject and my journey brought me to Marilee Adams’ book, Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 10 Powerful Tools for Life and Work (BK Life (Paperback)) .

In her book, one of the Question thinking tools she brings up is Q-Storming®. From the Inquiry Institute’s website:

Q-Storming is akin to brainstorming. Rather than seeking new answers and solutions, the goal of Q-Storming practice is to generate as many new questions as possible. Q-Storming empowers collaborative, creative and strategic thinking. It is a tool for moving beyond limitations in perception and thinking and advancing to novel and extraordinary solutions and answers. It is most often used when breakthroughs are sought in decision making, problem solving, strategic planning, and innovation.

Q-Storming is based on three premises: 

  1. Great results begin with great questions,
  2. Most any problem can be solved with enough of the right questions,
  3. The questions we ask ourselves often provide the most fruitful openings for new thinking and possibilities.

iStock_000011199205XSmallI thought the Q-storming idea was quite novel. How many times will you see Brainstorming sessions used to find a solution for a specific problem? It is encouraged practically by every facilitator that I know and arguably not even an effective strategy.

Brainstorming the questions is an area that I believe should be done more often. Have you ever done it with your sales and marketing people? Think of preparing for one of the stages of your marketing cycle. Have your sales and marketing team Q-storm a list of questions for the customer and their decision-making team.

I liken this to the Bill Walsh days at the San Francisco 49ers where he would script the first twenty-five plays. In the week preceding, they would practice those plays to perfection which resulted in less mistakes and penalties. They virtually ignored situational play-calling and as a result increased the game tempo. Executing these plays successfully could established momentum and dictate the flow of the game. It also gave the coaching staff an opportunity to run test plays against the defense to gauge their reactions in game situations. Later in the game, an observed tendency in a certain situation by the opposing defense could be exploited.

During the sales cycle your ability to have the right questions on hand would offer tremendous opportunity for improved quality of your sales and marketing interactions.  Review the advantage of scripting the plays. Would these same things assist you? Can you imagine at your daily meetings counting down on the team to answers received from the customer. Silly thought but you could even create a game out of it.

It may be even an exercise that you could include your customer team. You might be surprised how easy it is to break down barriers with a flow of questions. It may enhance your competitive position, not from the ability to generate a response but from the open and collaborative environment that develops.

Related Information:
Improve your Sales Cycle, Work on your Feedback Loops
The Little PDCA Sales Loop
There is no Team in Kaizen
Improve Communication – Have more meetings?
Quality and Collaboration eBook
The Role of PDCA in a Lean Sales and Marketing Cycle

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Lean Sales and Marketing Presentation at ASQ Columbus

This is my presentation on Lean Sales and Marketing at the ASQ Columbus Spring Conference. The notes, I used are with the slides. I have to admit though, that after the first slide, I never looked at the notes at all. I also included link to download the entire PDF. The notes are a little more cleaner in that version.

Related Information:
Lean Sales and Marketing PDF
PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation
Has Knowledge Management disguised itself as Lean Marketing?
The Future of Marketing is Lean
Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing
PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation

Can Lean Sales & Marketing learn from the Memory Champions?

I had a week of travel and caught up on my audible books for the month. The one I enjoyed the most was Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. A couple of the Q & A’s from Amazon:

Q: Can you explain the "OK Plateau?"

A: The OK Plateau is that place we all get to where we just stop getting better at something. Take typing, for example. You might type and type and type all day long, but once you reach a certain level, you just never get appreciably faster at it. That's because it's become automatic. You've moved it to the back of your mind's filing cabinet. If you want to become a faster typer, it's possible, of course. But you've got to bring the task back under your conscious control. You've got to push yourself past where you're comfortable. You have to watch yourself fail and learn from your mistakes. That's the way to get better at anything. And it's how I improved my memory.

How do you get past the “ok” plateau in sales and marketing? This is where I think a continuous improvement methodology such as PDCA comes into play. It takes deliberate practice to make perfect and to get better. Breaking the sales and marketing process down into bite size iterations allows you to do that. You could think of it as a pilot testing in a direct mail campaign for example. The author points out 3 things that allows an average person to be able to achieve championship status: Deliberate Practice, Bite Size Chunks and Analyze the results. He definitely believes a coach in analyzing the results is important.

I found it so coincidental that it was much like the learning cycles that Jeff Liker and Jim Franz discuss in their book, The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement: Linking Strategy and Operational Excellence to Achieve Superior Performance.

Q: What do you mean by saying there an "art" to memory?

A: The "art of memory" refers to a set of techniques that were invented in ancient Greece. These are the same techniques that Cicero used to memorize his speeches, and that medieval scholars used to memorize entire books. The "art" is in creating imagery in your mind that is so unusual, so colorful, so unlike anything you've ever seen before that it's unlikely to be forgotten. That's why mnemonists like to say that their skills are as much about creativity as memory.

The basic principles needed for improvement such as the scientific problem solving, hypothesis testing and memorization have been with us forever. It takes work and dedication to put them into practice. We are always looking for the next and greatest piece of software or even a book that will make it easier for us. Is technology serving our needs?

Q: How do you think technology has affected how and what we remember?

A: Once upon a time people invested in their memories, they cultivated them. They studiously furnished their minds. They remembered. Today, of course, we've got books, and computers and smart phones to hold our memories for us. We've outsourced our memories to external devices. The result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small forgotten thing as evidence that they're failing us altogether. We've forgotten how to remember.

Listen to author, Joshua describe his experience.

P.S. The book was fun.

Related Posts:
Dr. Jeff Liker on PDCA and Lean Culture>
Coaching Lean eBook with Dr. Liker
Continuous Improvement, The Toyota Way
The Role of PDCA in a Lean Sales and Marketing Cycle

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Continuous Improvement, The Toyota Way

James Franz was my guest on the Business901 podcast and this is a transcription of the podcast. If you have been spending your time improving your processes and wondering why you are not getting the expected returns, this is for you. Jim is the co-author with Jeffrey K. Liker on the latest of the Toyota Way books: The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement: Linking Strategy and Operational Excellence to Achieve Superior Performance.

Continuous Improvement: The Toyota Way

James Franz has over 24 years of manufacturing experience and learned lean as a Toyota Production Engineer in Japan. He started at the Motomachi plant and then moved to NUMMI and then finally worked in Georgetown, Kentucky. After leaving Toyota, he then went to Ford to apply his lean knowledge beginning in production engineering. He was sent to Ford of Australia for 3 years and led their Stamping, Assembly, Casting, and Powertrain facilities to global leadership in lean for Ford. Jim also teaches for the University of Michigan’s Center for Professional Development’s Lean Certification course.

About the Toyota Way Academy: The Academy’s mission is to teach the Toyota Way using the Toyota Way. For more information visit: www.toyotawayacademy.com

Related Podcast: Sustaining Lean using Continuous Improvement: The Toyota Way

Related Information:
Coaching Lean eBook with Dr. Liker
Dr. Jeff Liker on PDCA and Lean Culture>
PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation
Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA

Friday, June 10, 2011

Building a Sales and Marketing Team

This is a well documented video that I just was recently posted on the Agile Advice website. It can serve as a refresher or as a starting point on how you should assemble a Lean Sales and Marketing Team.

The process that IDEO goes through to innovate a new shopping cart: 

Could this mantra work on your team:

  • One conversation at a time
  • Stay focused on topic
  • Encourage wild ideas
  • Defer judgment
  • Build on the ideas of others

Great statement that resonates the main reason you should consider developing a sales and marketing team versus continuing in a silo style structure:

Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius!

Other Takeaways from the video:

  • Each team is assigned a need area
  • Time constraints.
  • Mock-ups or pilots
  • Fail often to succeed sooner!

Related Information:
Pair Problem Solving in the Workplace
There is no Team in Kaizen
Improve Communication – Have more meetings?
Quality and Collaboration eBook

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Can there be a marriage between ISO and Lean?

On the Business901 podcast, Lindsay Jackson Nichols discussed the business benefits of ISO Certification and how it can be used in conjunction with continuous improvement. Lindsay is the CEO of MOCG, a management consulting firm specializing in implementing process improvement and ISO based management systems.  me81609

When you first think about, you may think that Quality Management and a continuous improvement methodology like Lean are one in the same. You may also think that they are willing partners. Many disagree with that thought. My thoughts are that I find the ISO standards as a way to involve people from all departments to ask them how you do things. As a result, procedures and documentation are created to evaluate the current method of doing things (the first step in standard work) against the requirements of a standard (ISO).  As a result, you develop performance gaps for continuous improvement. Others believe that this would hinder the development and flexibility of standard work documents and prefer that they are divorced from each other. 

I probed this question with Lindsay and on a Lean Blog Post on Standard Work. The answer I believe to be correct is that ISO 9001 should not be the continuous improvement strategy just that it should be one metric by which continuous improvement is measured. However, I still believe using ISO as a standard to start the process of developing standard work is not a bad place to start.

 
Download Podcast: Click and choose options: ISO and Lean or go to the Business901 iTunes Store

About LJ Nichols: Lindsay’s career has been entirely devoted to management consulting, working with Grant Thornton LLP ‐ the fifth largest accounting and management consulting firm in the nation, assisting them develop a ‘center of excellence’ for their quality, environment and regulatory practice, and P‐E International plc/P‐E Handley Walker the largest management consulting firm in Europe, where she was integral in establishing their ISO presence in the US.

Related Information:
MOCGISO You Tube Videos
Agreeing on Standards in a Lean Enterprise
Is Standard Work needed in Sales and Marketing?
Where is the path in Continuous Improvement for Sales and Marketing?
Why does sales and marketing operate to a different quality standard?

Friday, June 3, 2011

Lean: A tool that creates Customer Relationships

This is a transcription of the podcast, Lean is the tool that Creates the Customer Relationship. The guest was Erik Haberkern, a General Sales Manager of a global Fortune 300 chemical company. We discussed the application of Lean in Sales and Marketing.  Eric first worked as a Facility Manager and soon became a Lean Deployment Manager. He transferred those skills to Sales and Marketing. Eric can be found on LinkedIn.

Lean as a Tool for Customer Relationships

Related Information:
The Subservient Marketing Funnel
Servant Leadership in the Toyota Culture
Can anyone truly understand and empathize with another?
Four Star General on Leadership–Listen, Learn…
Is PDCA a Culture or a Tool in a Lean Enterprise
Lean Sales and Marketing Roles

Marketing with PDCA ebook released on Business901 Website

Released as an eBook, Marketing with PDCA authored by Joseph T. Dager is now available on the Business901 website. Marketing with PDCA is about managing a value stream using PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act). Using the new SALES PDCA Framework throughout the marketing cycle will provide constant feedback from customers, and can only occur if they are part of the process. It is about creating value in your marketing that a customer needs to enable him to make a better decision.

Targeting that value proposition through the SALES PDCA methods described in this book will increase your ability to deliver quicker and more accurately than your competitor. It is a moving target and the principles of Lean and PDCA facilitate the journey to customer value.

This book also introduces the Kanban as a planning tool or, as I like to think about it, as an execution tool. Improving your marketing process does not have to constitute wholesale changes nor increased spending. Getting more customers into your Marketing Kanban may not solve anything at all. Improving what you do and increasing the speed that you do it can result in an increase in sales and a decrease in expenses.  MwPDCA

Table of Contents

  1. Lean Marketing House
  2. Future of Marketing
  3. Marketing Funnels
  4. Cycles to Loops
  5. Knowledge Management
  6. PDCA
  7. Sales and Marketing Teams
  8. Kanban
  9. SALES PDCA
  10. Marketing with PDCA Summary
  11. Marketing with PDCA Case Study
  12. Constancy of Purpose
  13. Marketing with Lean Program Series

The book is the fourth part in the series of the Marketing with Lean Program: This series consist of the five individual products.

  1. Lean Marketing House
  2. Driving Market Share
  3. Marketing with PDCA
  4. Marketing with A3
  5. Marketing your Black Belt (coming soon)

Related Information:
SALES PDCA Framework for Lean Sales and Marketing
Continuous Improvement, The Toyota Way
Drucker and Deming = Lean Marketing
Visit the Marketing with A3Website