Business901 Book Specials from other authors on Amazon

Friday, July 29, 2011

Individual Kaizen, Putting yourself first!

Individual Kaizen will make you better today and as a result opens doors tomorrow! Learn how by practicing 3 things to do in your individual life! The Friday Video Series continues with Dr. Michael Balle, the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute. This series of videos continues with a central theme of Kaizen.

The video stops a little short at the end. Don’t be alarmed!

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

Past Videos with Dr. Balle on the Biz901 You Tube Channel

Related Information:
What’s behind Collaboration and Value Networks?
Asking the right questions about Lean?
Pair Problem Solving in the Workplace
Business Processes as Value Networks

Monday, July 25, 2011

Can you be Lucky by Design?

Beth Goldstein, Founder and CEO is an author, consultant, trainer and founder of Marketing Edge Consulting Group, she has empowered hundreds of entrepreneurs to successfully grow their companies.  We discussed her newest book, Lucky By Design: Creating Real Opportunities that Empower Your Business coming out this fall.Beth Goldstein Web Image

Beth‘s special talents is helping companies gain an understanding of how their customers think, what they value and what influences their purchasing decisions. She then applies this knowledge to create targeted sales and marketing programs that drive revenue growth while increasing profitability and customer loyalty.

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

Her first book, The Ultimate Small Business Marketing Toolkit: All the Tips, Forms, and Strategies You'll Ever Need! is used in 30+ cities around the U.S. to teach business owners the critical skills they need to accelerate growth.

Are You Lucky In Business?

TAKE HER 5 MINUTE SURVEY &
RECEIVE OVER $75 IN VALUABLE BUSINESS TOOLS FOR SHARING YOUR OPINION

(You will be re-directed to Beth’s site.)

Related Information:
Lean Thinking: Prototype early and often
Using the Media Engagement Framework as your Kanban?
What’s behind Collaboration and Value Networks?
Business Processes as Value Networks
The Role of PDCA in a Lean Sales and Marketing Cycle

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Three ways to Improve your Marketing!

This is a timeless Ted talk from 2003. Design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at design that makes people happy. He names the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.

For marketers and designers alike.

Related Information:
Is Viral Still Possible? More than ever before
How new is Service Dominant Logic and does it apply now?
It’s not your Grandmother’s Lean anymore!
What Can Lean Sales & Marketing learn from the Memory Champions?

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Gemba Coach talks PDCA

The Friday Video Series with Dr. Michael Balle, the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute recently PDCAcompeted a month long series on PDCA. As I reviewed the video, I found that over 30% of the material had been edited out. I have included the entire audio of the conversation as a podcas. Even if you have watched the videos I think you will find it worthwhile.

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Gemba Coach on PDCA or go to the Business901 iTunes Store

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:
SALES PDCA Framework for Lean Sales and Marketing
Continuous Improvement, The Toyota Way
Marketing with PDCA eBook released on Business901 Website
Lean is not a revolution, Lean is solve one thing and prove one thing!

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

How new is Service Dominant Logic and does it apply now?

In researching Service Dominant Logic (S-D Logic), I found the concept not all that new. I found the catalyst for this interest was the publication of an article by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch in a 2004 edition of Journal of Marketing entitled “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing and later their book,The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing.

Digging deeper, I found  that Wroe Alderson (1898–1965) the most recognized marketing theorist of the twentieth century and the “father of modern marketing” started the ball rolling when he redefined the value-in-use concept as an alternative to the dominant value exchange theory. He actually traced it back through the ideas of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and a variety of 17th, 18th and 19th century economists. In other words, it has been around a while.

Updating my thinking of SD-Logic marketing concept to present day, I came across this presentation by Wim Rampen, the Managing Consultant at Contact Center Intelligence and Wim can be found at: http://wimrampen.com/.

I think his “7 Jobs of Marketing” are spot on and a nice addition to the thoughts of Lean Marketing and Design Thinking. It is the involvement of the customer and being in the marketplace where your customers are using your product, fundamental Lean Thinking.. The point so often missed by most marketers today. It goes all the way back to Aristotle, the value-in-use concept. If your marketing and your relationships (sales) are being created in this arena, value is attached to them.

Tired of only 50% of your marketing working? Deliver value in the arena your customer lives in!

Related Information:
Leading the Way in Iowa Quality Training
Asking the right questions about Lean?
Service Design Thinking
Improve your Sales Cycle, Work on your Feedback Loops
The Little PDCA Sales Loop

Identifying your Lean sales and marketing teams

When I use the SALES PDCA approach in Lean Marketing, I emphasize the use of sales and marketing teams. It is one of the underlying principles that is needed. Sales has operated for so many years based on the idea of the individual salesperson calling on “his” accounts and the organization reinforcing this structure through individual commissions that it is very difficult to consider another way even working. A preliminary description of all of the roles can be found in this post: Lean Sales and Marketing Roles.

Team RolesI am creating a series of blog posts to add more insight into developing sales and marketing teams and there are some basic team development structures that need to be identified at the very beginning. One of these areas is the basic consideration of objectives. I prefer the method established way back in 1989 by Larson and LaFasto and later emphasized in the book, Rapid Development . They state that you first consider the kind of team needed: Problem Resolution, Creativity or Tactical execution.

Once you established the objectives you choose a team structure to match it. Without this process you may have creative teams working on tactical execution or on the other hand a problem solving team working on a creative solution. In the SALES PDCA framework we emphasize before starting the PDCA IMPROVEMENT LOOP is locate the people who understand the process. An abbreviated definition of that step is:

Locate the people who understand the process: One of the key considerations in developing a team is to determine the objective of the cycle. Is it primarily problem-resolution, creativity, or tactical execution? Team structure needs to be considered as well as the participants. You will find a variety of structures will work for you but the typical model in sales and marketing is one of a business team that has a team leader and all others are on equal footing. Many times the team leader is really just a participant but has the administrative work as an added responsibility.

Kinds of Teams: Once you've identified the team's broadest objective—problem resolution, creativity, or tactical execution—then you set up a team structure that emphasizes the characteristic that is most important for that kind of team. For a problem-resolution team, you emphasize trust for a creativity team, autonomy for a tactical-execution team, clarity. Listed below is an outline identifying the team structures.

Adapted from Teamwork and the Rapid Development books:

Problem-resolution team:

  1. Objective: Focuses on solving a complex, poorly defined problems.
  2. Dominant Feature: Trust
  3. Sales Process Example: Sales inquiry for proposal
  4. Process emphasis: Focus on issues
  5. Lifecycle Models: Try and Fix, spiral
  6. Team Members: Intelligent, street-smart, people sensitive, high integrity
  7. Team Models: Business team, professional athletic team, search and rescue, swat

Creativity Team:

  1. Objective: Explore possibilities and alternatives.
  2. Dominant Feature: Autonomy
  3. Sales Process Example: Creating a new advertising program
  4. Process emphasis: Explore possibilities and alternatives
  5. Lifecycle Models: Evolutionary prototyping, evolutionary delivery, staged delivery, spiral, design-to-schedule
  6. Team Members: Cerebral, independent thinkers, self-starters, tenacious
  7. Team Models: Business team. feature team, skunk-works team, theater team

Tactical-Execution Team

  1. Objective: Focuses on carrying out a well-defined plan.
  2. Dominant Feature: Clarity
  3. Sales Process Example: Upgrade to an existing product
  4. Process emphasis: Highly focused task with clear roles
  5. Lifecycle Models: Waterfall, design to schedule, spiral, staged delivery
  6. Team Members: Loyal, committed, action-orientated, sense of urgency, responsiveness
  7. Team Models: Business team. feature team, swat

Do you identify your sales and marketing teams differently?

Related posts:
How to build a Sales and Marketing Team
Pair Problem Solving in the Workplace
There is no Team in Kaizen
Improve Communication – Have more meetings?

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Using the wrong set of 5 whys in problem solving

Do you try to quickly to get to why? The purpose of most questioning is to stimulate reflective thinking by probing for needs and concerns. Instead of probing with the 5 why’s try a more subtle approach or architecture for your sales and marketing.

In the paper, The Art and Architecture of Powerful Questions by Eric Vogt, he states that most groups working on this dimension of linguistic architecture produce a variant of the following general hierarchy.

WhyThe general thesis is that virtually any question can be converted into a more powerful question by moving up the pyramid. As an example, consider the following sequence:

  1. Are you feeling okay?
  2. Where does it hurt?
  3. How are you feeling in general?
  4. Why do you suppose you aren't feeling well?

As we move from the simple yes/no question towards the why question, you probably notice that the questions tend to motivate more reflective thinking, and are generally more "powerful.

There are refinements within this dimension of linguistic architecture available to an interested practitioner. For instance, using the conditional tense rather than the present tense will often invite greater reflective speculation:

  • What can we do?

seems to offer fewer possibilities than...

  • What could we do?

I like this architecture because Why is too powerful of a question to start with. Toyota’s, seven step “Practical Problem Solving Process” model encourages you to stay away from why till the fourth step.

  1. Initial problem perception
  2. Clarify the problem
  3. Locate area or point of concern
  4. Investigate root cause (5 Whys)
  5. Countermeasure
  6. Evaluate
  7. Standardize

They actually follow a similar architecture depicted in the triangle above. They used simple closed ended questions to identify and clarify the problem and then locate the area of concern though the 5 whys. Not the 5 Whys of root cause, but the 5 whys of When, Who, Where, Which and What.

The power of the first 5 whys is where the true power of discovery lies. It is the focusing step that provides clarity and provides the basis for agreement. Without these steps irrelevant information may be acted upon and finding agreement on root cause may be difficult. Effective action can only follow clear thinking. Providing a consensus on the point of concern before moving to root cause is imperative.

In the paper cited, author Eric Vogt goes on to state:

The dialogue group concluded that clearly one dimension which defines a

powerful question is this linguistic architecture. However, other factors are also at play when we consider the relative power of the following two questions:

  1. Why is my coat unbuttoned?
  2. Where can we find spiritual peace?

This is an instance where most people would say that the "where" question has somewhat greater power than the "why" question. After reflection, we hypothesized that there were probably three dimensions which define a powerful question: Architecture, Context and Scope.”

The paper is a short and easy read and I encourage you read it in full.

Related Information:
Problem Solving – Think 3, Not 5
Pair Problem Solving in the Workplace
Problem Solving really the Core of Lean Implementation
Quit Brainstorming and start Q-Storming®

Visit the Marketing with A3Website

Saturday, July 16, 2011

It’s not your Grandmother’s Lean anymore!

I had the pleasure of spending my day reading cover to cover, Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers and the book lays out an excellent  framework for understanding and implementing  Design Thinking within your organization.

The book speaks for itself, a few outtakes:

A funny thing often happens as we pay close attention to what customers are up to – we find the clues to the new future in dissatisfactions with the present.

Brainstorming is 90% planning, 10% execution

Have you ever seen a 7-year-old make paper airplanes? Then you’ve seen design thinking.

The goal isn’t to nail it; the goal is to identify new hypothesis that may help you reinvent the process.

“Creating new concepts de[pends a lot more on discipline than on creativity. You take the ten most creative people you can find anywhere. Give me a squad of ten marines and right protocols and I promise we’ll out-innovate you.” – Larry Keeley of Doblin

Prototyping = Faking a new business fast.

Design Thinking begins with Design Doing

Listen to Tim Ogilvie talk about the book…

On Designing for Growth from Tim Ogilvie on Vimeo.

Design Thinking compliments Lean in many ways. Just as Lean, it emphasizes seeking value at Gemba or from the customer’s point  of view. It also emphasizes a learn by doing approach. The Design Thinking approach may even emphasize visualization more so than Lean.

Several reason I found the book so interesting is that it reminded me on how I apply the 5 principles of Lean to marketing. In fact, the “tooling” is very similar and the book offered a deeper insight into my own processes. One example being that it challenged me to resist conclusions and recognize that only customers have them. I should frame the situation to extract that information from them. It also reinforced my efforts to understand the current state, an area that frustrates many clients. At the very beginning of explaining the What is? stage  they make the statement, “Step away from That Crystal Ball.”     

My frustrations with many Lean and “Lean Six Sigma” Practitioners are that you are unable to move them away from thinking about Lean as a waste reduction tool. As any reader of my blog knows, I look at waste reduction as only a by-product of Lean. Lean is about problem solving and knowledge creation, PDCA.

Design Thinking is a hot trend right now and Lean Practitioners can learn much from it. I put down this book thinking, It’s not your Grandmother’s Lean anymore! Are we finally ready to stop thinking about lean as a waste reduction tool?    

P.S. I believe Lean Six Sigma is an oxymoron. Both are very good methodologies and are only used together for marketing purposes.

Buy the Book: Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers

Related Information:
How new is Service Dominant Logic and does it apply now?
Asking the right questions about Lean?
Service Design Thinking
The Role of PDCA in a Lean Sales and Marketing Cycle

Empower yourself before the Team

Razi Imam is an accomplished award winning innovator, entrepreneur, and author. He has experience and knowledge of successfully innovating products and services, launching them in competitive markets, and building world-class high-performance teams.

Razi;s new book Driven: A How-to Strategy for Unlocking Your Greatest Potential is discussed in the podcast and you are introduced to a powerful motivational philosophy. I think you will find the podcast a little different than most of mine as we discuss self and team development. Razi is an excellent and captivating speaker. 

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Empower Yourself or go to the Business901 iTunes Store. Razi Imam

Razi is the founder of a fast growing software company called Landslide Technologies that is receiving rave reviews from customers, analysts and press. His company has been named 'visionary' three years in row by the leading analyst firm - The Gartner Group. He has also recently founded 113 Industries, an industry-driven business incubator focusing on advanced materials. The goal of this incubator is to help breakthrough discoveries in advanced materials coming from our universities, and government labs become viable commercial products.

Related Information:
What will your workplace be like in 2020?
Change Education, Change the Sales Cycle
The Different Levels of Kaizen
Transforming Ordinary Teams to Extraordinary

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Lean Sales and Marketing Team Roles

In a previous post, Identifying your Lean sales and marketing teams, I discussed how to choose the objectives and the team structure to match it. After that, you need to identify the team member roles with I describe below. This is part of the SALES PDCA framework that we use before starting the PDCA IMPROVEMENT LOOP. Sales Team Roles

One of the biggest obstacles to effective performance of a sales and marketing team is the lack of a clear vision of responsibilities within the team. Understanding how the team operates helps clarifies the individual team member roles to each other and more importantly externally and specifically to management. I relied heavily on the book Rapid Development as a guideline for the description of the different team models below and highly recommend the book for the depth of knowledge that it contains. This is not meant to be an all-encompassing list nor does it mean that you should utilize more than one team model. It should only be used to help identify your team model for yourself and others.

Business Team: The most common team structure is where there is one lead person and all other team members have equal status. They are differentiated by the technical, customer relationships and social abilities. The team leader is the link to management and often responsible for making final decisions on unresolved issues. The business team structure looks like a typical hierarchi­cal structure. It is adaptable enough that it can work on all kinds of projects-problem resolution, creativity and tactical execution, but its generality is also its weakness, and in many cases a different structure can work better.

Sales Team: The Sales team takes advantage of the relationship that the salesperson has with the customer. In this concept, the salesperson is simply the superstar, much like the surgeon on a surgical-team. This person due to his intimate knowledge of the customer is ultimately responsible for virtually all of the decisions on a project. With the salesperson handling the bulk of the customer interaction, other team mem­bers are free to specialize but only in a supportive role. This structure can work quite well in the short term if from a tactical sense you need to get a project done fast or from a creative sense where a certain idea has been mandated.

Skunk-works Team: A skunkworks team takes a group of talented, creative people, puts them in an area where they will be freed of the organization's normal bureaucratic restrictions, and turns them loose to develop and innovate. These teams are most appropriate for exploratory projects on which creativity is all-important. Skunkworks teams are rarely the most rapid struc­ture when you need to solve a narrowly defined problem or when you need to execute a well-understood plan.

Feature Team: In the feature-team approach marketing people report to marketing managers, developer report to development manager, and so on. Layered on top of this traditional organization are teams that draw one or more members from each of these groups and that are given responsibility for a chunk of the sales cycle functionality. The team becomes accountable. They have access to all the people they need to make good decisions. Feature teams are appropriate for problem-resolution projects because they have empowerment and accountability needed to resolve issues expe­diently. They are also good for creativity projects because interdiscipli­nary team composition can stimulate ideas. The additional overhead incurred with feature teams will be wasted on tactical-execution projects-if all me tasks are clearly-defined, feature teams have little to contribute.

Search-and-Rescue Team: In the search-and-rescue team model, the team acts like a group of emergency medical technicians who go looking for missing mountain climb­ers. The search-and-rescue team focuses on solving a specific problem. It is most appropriate for teams that need to focus on problem resolution. It is too bottom-line orientated to support much creativity and too short-term oriented to support tactical execution.

SWAT Team: The SWAT team model is based on military or police SWAT teams, in which "SWAT" stands for "special weapon and tactics." The idea behind a SWAT team is to take a group of people who are highly skilled with a par­ticular tool or practice and turn them loose on a problem that is well suited to being solved by that tool or practice. SWAT teams are especially appropriate on tactical-execution projects. Their job is not to be creative but to implement a solution within the limits of a tool or a practice that they know well. SWAT teams can also work well on problem-resolution projects.

Professional Athletic Team: The athletes are the stars of the baseball team, and the salespeople are the stars of this team. The team leader and support staff’s role is to clear roadblocks and enable the salespeople to work efficiently. This specific model applies best to tactical-execution projects, which empha­size the highly specialized roles that individual players play. You can apply the model's general idea that management plays a supporting role to devel­opment to all kinds of projects.

Theater Team: The theater team is characterized by strong direction and a lot of negotia­tion about team roles. The central role on the project is occupied by the director, who maintains the vision of the team and signs people responsibility for individual areas. Individual contributors can shape their roles, their parts of the project, as their own artistic instincts move them. But they can't take their ideas so far that they clash with the director' vision. The theater model is particularly appropriate for teams that are dominated by strong personalities. If a role is important enough, and a particular level that the only one who can play it, the director might decide that he or she is willing to put up with the prima-donna for the sake of the project. But if the rest of the cast is strong, the director might pass up a prima donna in order to have a smoother project.

Summary: Regardless of how the teams are organized, I think it is critical that there be a single person who is ultimately responsible for the product's concep­tual integrity. That person can be cast as the architect, surgeon, director, or even sometimes the program manager, but there must be a person whose job it is to be sure that all the teams' good local solutions add up to a good global solution.

Did I leave a team out?

Related Information:
Identifying your Lean sales and marketing teams
What will your workplace be like in 2020?
What’s behind Collaboration and Value Networks?
SALES PDCA Framework for Lean Sales and Marketing

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Is it an insult to say that it's documented?

Lindsay Jackson Nichols discussed the business benefits of ISO Certification and how it can be used in conjunction with continuous improvement in the Business901 podcast, Can there be a marriage between ISO and Lean? Lindsay is the CEO of MOCG, a management consulting firm specializing in implementing process improvement and ISO based management systems. This is a transcription of the podcast with added content. An excerpt from the transcription:

Joe:  That's one of the big resistances to Lean is the perception that you are standardizing all the work and making robots out of everyone. But standard work is kind of what you're saying that ISO is all about. It's making work standard. I mean, being explicit in what it is. And that's not a bad thing because if there is a deviation from it, you would raise the flag, or in the Lean terms, someone would pull an Andon cord.

Lindsay:  Exactly. You find me one new employee joining an organization that will ever complain that there is something in documented form that tells them how they should be performing something. They cry out for it. But how many times do you hear people say "Oh yeah, it's baptism by fire here." Nobody likes to be in that situation. I mean I've been through it myself; it's disconcerting. People want to be productive; they want to get up and running fast. What you tend to hear from the more seasoned people is "Oh, but it's so unique, what we do. There's no way you could possibly standardize it." Of course that's complete nonsense. There are certain things, obviously, every order is different. The flavor of what a customer wants versus the next one, absolutely.

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?

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Lean Sales and Marketing, the Value Stream Manager

Overview: The Value Stream Manager is responsible for maximizing return on investment (ROI) through his particular value stream of customer identification, customer value, customer acquisition, customer retention and customer monitoring (Value Stream Mapping Customer Value). He translates this value stream and assigns it in conjunction with the team coordinator to particular teams similar to how a typical sales manager would to his salespeople. The VSM and the team coordinator will routinely evaluate the outcomes to determine best fit. The VSM may work with multiple teams for his value stream. The VSM has profit and loss responsibility for the product/service. The VSM represents the Voice of the Market, which may be thousands of individual clients, distributors, brokers and agents. As with Scrum’s product owner, the VSM has the final authority.VSM

Again building on familiar ground you may want to equate this position to the Product Owner in Scrum, the Champion in a Six Sigma Project, Product Manager in Marketing or the Value Stream Manager in Lean. The short summary of their responsibilities: They assume the business interest of the product, service or value stream. They are the product/service owners and are held accountable for the commercial success of the product/service.

In Lean Sales and Marketing, the Value Stream Manager is held accountable for their Value Stream that is described in the 5Cs of Driving Market Share; Customer Identification, Customer Value, Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention and Customer Monitoring. In addition, the VSM has profit and loss responsibility for the product. Different than a Product Owner in Scrum, the VSM does represent the needs of the client in a project but is typically in contact with the client through the project team. The lean sales team actually performs the activities with the customer.

The VSM interacts with the team offering the priorities and reviewing the results with the Team Coordinator at each control point. It is important to note that as in Scrum there are two important principles. During iterations, the sales team has complete autonomy and should only be interacted with through the team coordinator. The other similarity is that the VSM is the one and only one person who has the final authority.

The VSM will prioritize the backlog or the iterations in the marketing value stream. These needs are best expressed or written in the form of User Stories. Depending on the size and complexity of the organization, the Sales Team, the Team Coordinator and the Value Stream Manager may meet to discuss an iteration or an entire marketing cycle. During the meeting the user stories are prioritized and discussed by all involved in the process. The sales team then takes these stories and breaks them down into activities and create single, multiple iterations that may be completed in a linear or parallel fashion. When these stories are completed, a control gate review occurs where the results are accepted or rejected by the Value Stream Manager. The VSM, the Team and the Team Coordinator discuss improvements, the next stage or coordinate a handoff to another Team. This process should have a very strong focus on where the customer is in their decision making process and what the best way is to support them at this time.

Whereas the team concerns itself around the Voice of the Customer (VOC), the VSM must look at both VOC and Voice of Market (VOM). Following the 5Cs of Driving Market Share outline, the VSM must:

  1. Identify specific products/markets that offer organization best options for growth.
  2. Create a value model for each of targeted product or market.
  3. Clearly state the organization’s competitive value proposition.
  4. Identify the direction needed to enhance that value proposition.
  5. Monitor competitive value proposition.

The Value Stream Manager can be one person or an entire department. However, for the VSM to be effective, they have to have control over setting the priorities not only for the sales and marketing teams but many times for product development. Their decisions should be visible to the entire organization. As I like to put it, they hold the gold within the company: knowledge of both VOC and VOM. This visibility makes the role of VSM both demanding and a very rewarding one.

Related Information:
Identifying your Lean sales and marketing teams
What will your workplace be like in 2020?
What’s behind Collaboration and Value Networks?
SALES PDCA Framework for Lean Sales and Marketing

Friday, July 1, 2011

building relationships with Kaizen

The Friday Video Series continues with Dr. Michael Balle, the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute. The next series of videos has a central theme of Kaizen. This particular video focuses on using individual Kaizen to empower others.

How do you build trust in a business relationship?

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.

Related Information:
Dr. Jeff Liker on PDCA and Lean Culture>
Pair Problem Solving in the Workplace
Must See Training Video for Continuous Improvement
The 4 Disciplines of Execution (Revised Edition): The Secret to Getting Things Done, On Time, With Excellence.