Your Marketing Machine: March 2012

Friday, March 30, 2012

Cohesiveness of People and Process drives Profit

Next weeks Business901 podcast is Vivian Hairston Blade. Vivian is the Founder, President & CEO of Experts in Growth Leadership Consulting, LLC (EiGL Consulting, LLC) based in Louisville, KY. EiGL Consulting focus their energies on helping develop an effective strategy to create customer value. Through a combination of coaching and training, they help you put that strategy into place through change management strategies that create committed leadership and organizational discipline.

I gave the Vivian the perfect opportunity to promote herself in the podcast and instead she continued coaching and adding value:

Joe: What are your plans going forward?

Vivian: Well, our plan is to continue to build on this idea of people and process and that cohesiveness between the two that help companies drive growth. As you look at the environment, the marketplace, the economy, and how it changes and how it will change in the future and how we'll need to still continue to be conservative in so many ways especially when it comes to money and finances and investments, to realize that people investment is important, that operational process investment is important as it relates to customer focus and serving customer needs.

Helping companies realize that without that connection and that understanding of why you exist and how to operationally serve the why you exist, what your value is in this customer relationship, without this you won't have a business for very long.

You know, it's unfortunate that we see so many of these companies in today's economy who have been icons in the American industry, your Kodak and your Hostess, Hewlett Packard, so many, even Netflix recently who decided to change both their service and their pricing policy and lost millions of customers. They made a 360 degree turn. And, just in the Wall Street Journal in the past few days there was an article about how they are beginning to now recover their customers.

But, without that skill of listening that we just talked about a minute ago, you haven't a clue what the impact is going to be when you make some of those changes, or do you even really care it's almost too late? So, we're helping companies to have a good ear to the ground on that customer connection and building an environment where employees can thrive toward reaching their career goals and helping the company to achieve it's goals.

My Engagement Strategy – Appreciative Inquiry

Most people want ideas and applications that I would propose before we start working together. I equate that to starting on the right side of the A3 (with the answers in layman terms). So recently I have developed a structure that makes more sense. I leave the customer determine the price and budget for the encounter.

I believe in creating a Lean Marketing system. You can't write and teach Lean Sales and Marketing. It is a Learn by doing approach. What I do is provide you a platform for co-creation through joint experiences and incorporate feedback as we put them into practice. The steps of Lean Sales and Marketing are first you go and create a current state. Second, you form a working vision from the user (customer) experience, an ideal situation of where the user wants to go. Third, you visualize the user's process. If you do that, it's more obvious to see what your next reaction should be and when to trigger it.

Many people respond to the latest fad or solicit the cleverest idea to implement some sort of solution, thinking it will make them better. What makes your marketing better is understanding the user or customer experience and their processes. Then with hard work, take the time to figure out how to engage with them. It's this process, that empowers you and which leads you to create better and more performing processes. Using this approach, a Lean system will outperform any other approach in engaging the customers you need, maintaining customers and working with people you like and who will be loyal to you and refer others to you forever.

This is the initial sequence of steps we use to create a Lean Marketing System in an organization. It ensures we carefully think through what outcomes we want to create, what supports and barriers we need to plan for, and who we have to involve within your organization to guarantee success. Our starting point:

(Definition) What are you presently doing and how do your clients and organization feel about them?
(Discovery) What is your present value proposition for retaining customers? What is your present value proposition for acquiring customers?
(Dream)What are your targets? How will we measure success?
(Design) Do you understand your customer’s decision making process? For each product/market segment?
(Destiny) What’s your investment strategy – not only in media, but in time and events?

What I ask for is simply a marketing budget for me to manage. We allocate a percentage of the budget for fees, creative and production, with the balance going to media, materials, internet presence and other out of pocket expenses. At the beginning it is slanted towards the fee side and overtime shifts as we don’t need to recreate materials and programs from scratch. It can be very cost effective if I am able to use my own resources and fold you into existing processes. I host and manage websites, post products to Amazon, handle news releases, create interview opportunities, host guest blog posts and podcasts, orchestrate events, create info product and manage shopping carts at little if any additional costs. There is little time spent by the client except for telephone interviews and final review of materials.

P.S. What I will not do is masquerade as your persona in social media. I believe that this typically backfires both in creditability and expected results.

Unbeknownst to me what I described in the starting points is the outline for Appreciative Inquiry. In parenthesis above; Definition, Discovery, Dream, Design and Destiny is the AI Process, which I detail below:

Definition: What frames our inquiry?
Discovery: What gives life?
Dream: What might be?
Design: What should be?
Destiny: What will be?

Never knew I was an Appreciative Inquiry guy!

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Lean Sales and Marketing Summit is Quickly Approaching

In preparation for this Duane Butcher of the hosting organization, Lean Frontiers wrote this in a recent newsletter:

Marketing activities such as developing promotion programs, branding, developing ads and writing copy are seen as creative processes that don’t lend themselves to systematization without losing the ability to think outside the box.

Most efforts to improve Sales and Marketing so far have come from Six Sigma or Lean Office programs that largely derive their practices from the production environment. The personality style of a star salesperson or an innovative marketer clashes with the type of person who is going to embrace standardized processes and continuous, incremental improvement.

If these arguments sound familiar, they are the same ones used ten years ago to keep lean out of Research & Development: breakthrough innovation cannot be standardized, lean manufacturing practices don’t work and star technologists don’t appreciate process excellence. The solution is to recognize that like R & D, sales and marketing functions are knowledge creation processes.

Product developers add value when they deepen their knowledge about the product design and then convert that knowledge into a product that a customer can buy. Similarly, marketing and sales functions add value when they deepen the company’s knowledge about customers and market needs, and then support R & D as they make decisions that lead to products to meet those needs. They also add customer value when they deepen the customer’s knowledge about the product. In fact, the best sales people are those who take the time to deeply understand an individual customer’s needs so that they can recommend the products and services that will best meet those needs.

We will be able to conquer the final frontier for the lean enterprise when we recognize that when the value a process creates is knowledge, it must be managed as a Knowledge Creation Value Stream to maximize the value we get from the knowledge created, and minimize the wastes of knowledge loss, ineffective decision-making.

P.S. You want a fresh approach to marketing that is something other than just a new set of tools. Consider attending the Lean Sales and Marketing Summit. I have a limited amount of tickets left; please contact me to check availability.

The Lean Sales and Marketing Summit is quickly approaching. It is a two day workshop.

Bill Waddell. On April 17th, Bill will be presenting Aligning the Entire Organization to Achieve the Sales Strategy. He will show you how to devise a sales and marketing strategy built around creating the most value for your customers; how to set prices strategically, rather than on the basis of standard costs, assuring that prices will not cause you to lose a sale.

The next day, I will be presenting Using Lean to Create Repeatable and Scalable Sales and Marketing Systems: A Customer Centric Approach Through Lean. The workshop will be two-thirds presentation and one-third interactive exercises.

Please consider joining us.
Related Information:
Lean Sales & Marketing Summit Announced
The Other Half of the Lean and Sales Marketing Summit
Traditional vs. Emerging Thoughts on Pricing

A Service Design Thinking Primer

My blog and podcast for next few months will focus on Business Strategists, Design Thinkers, Appreciative Inquiry Coaches, Architects and of course Lean Thinkers. I could not think of a better way to start this series than having a podcast with co-author Marc Stickdorn of This is Service Design Thinking. This is a transcription of the podcast.

Open publication

Rather Listen? Service Design Thinking Podcast with Marc Stickdorn

About: Marc Stickdorn graduated in Strategic Management and Marketing and worked in various tourism projects throughout Europe. Since 2008 Marc is full-time staff at the MCI – Management Center Innsbruck in Austria, where he lectures service design and service innovation. His main areas of interest are service design and strategic marketing management particularly in a tourism context. This involves research such as the development of a mobile ethnography application for mobile phones, the Customer Journey Canvas and various publications and presentations. Marc is co-founder and consultant of “Destinable – service design for tourism” and guest lecturer at different business and design schools. His Websites: http://thisisservicedesignthinking.com/, http://www.servicedesignresearch.com.

Monday, March 26, 2012

What’s New in Business Model Generation?

The Business Model Canvas is an analytical tool outlined in the book Business Model Generation. It is a visual template preformatted with the nine blocks of a business model, which allows you to develop and sketch out new or existing business models. This book has sold over 220,000 copies the past two years and has established itself as one of the leading sources of modeling for both startups and established businesses. This is a transcription of the podcast I had with co-author, Alex Osterwalder.

Sample of What’s inside:

What you want to figure out is, what's the best way? If you're a business, what's the best and most profitable way to do that? So it's not about finding a solution, it's about finding a good design. That's something that designers are good at. They have techniques to do that.

If you're an engineer, you have the problem solution approach. You'll try to find in a linear way, the solution to your problem. You'll look at it as an equation, and you'll use different methods. I think the methods that we really want to look at are those by designers who look at 10, 20, 30 different alternatives and try to find the best design for a specific context.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

People & Process Drive Profit Podcast

Vivian Hairston Blade, Founder, President & CEO of Experts in Growth Leadership Consulting, LLC (EiGL Consulting, LLC) based in Louisville, KY was my podcast guest. Vivian is a recognized expert, keynote speaker, trainer and executive coach in the principles of Customer Experience, Lean Six Sigma and Leadership Development. With a 20+ year career in Fortune 100 companies, General Electric and Humana, Inc., Vivian has extensive experience in successfully leading the development and execution of customer centered, quality-based, growth business strategies.

Through EiGL Consulting, Vivian has helped clients achieve direct cost savings and productivity by more than 10%, implement customer loyalty and customer service programs, and has coached and trained hundreds of professionals in customer experience implementation and leadership skill development. Her articles have been published in many professional, industry and business publications.

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

EiGL Consulting is WBENC, TSMSDC and SBA-WOSB certified, accredited by the Better Business Bureau, and is a member of Greater Louisville, Inc. Vivian's website is: http://eiglconsulting.com/

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Do You Know the Right Job For Your Products?

From Innosight and authored by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, Gerald Berstell, Denise Nitterhouse

The market segmentation scheme that a company chooses to adopt is a decision of vast consequence. It determines what that company decides to produce, how it will take those products to market, who it believes its competitors to be and how large it believes its market opportunities to be. Yet many managers give little thought to whether their segmentation of the market is leading their marketing efforts in the right direction. Most companies segment along lines defined by the characteristics of their products (category or price) or customers (age, gender, marital status and income level). Some business-to-business companies slice their markets by industry; others by size of business. The problem with such segmentation schemes is that they are static. Customers' buying behaviors change far more often than their demographics, psychographics or attitudes. Demographic data cannot explain why a man takes a date to a movie on one night but orders in pizza to watch a DVD from Netflix Inc. the next.

Product and customer characteristics are poor indicators of customer behavior, because from the customer's perspective that is not how markets are structured. Customers' purchase decisions don’t necessarily conform to those of the "average" customer in their demographic; nor do they confine the search for solutions within a product category. Rather, customers just find themselves needing to get things done. When customers find that they need to get a job done, they "hire" products or services to do the job. This means that marketers need to understand the jobs that arise in customers' lives for which their products might be hired. Most of the "home runs" of marketing history were hit by marketers who saw the world this way. The "strike outs" of marketing history, in contrast, generally have been the result of focusing on developing products with better features and functions or of attempting to decipher what the average customer in a demographic wants.

In a discussion, I had with Alex Osterwalder this week he spent a great deal time talking about this concept and how it relates to Customer Value. Alex is the author of the Business Model Generation and next weeks podcast guest.

This is a similar concept to Service Design via Service-Dominant Logic where the foundational belief is that value is derived through the use of your product/service. Your product/service is only an enabler of value. Utilizing this concept, can your product/service be given away for free and as a result be paid for through the use of it? Let's say Xerox gives a printer and services the printer for free and gets paid on the use of it. Zipcar is another example - you only pay when you use it. There may be a minor membership fee but the real cost would be associated with the use of the product.

Does anyone have other examples where the value in use concept is used?

Is highlighting 'value in use" an effective marketing tactic?

Can you segment markets through how you use a product?

Do you have other question that this concept raises?

Join the conversation on this subject at the Lean Marketing Lab.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

A Good Architect is an enabling Orchestra Leader,

not a Distant Composer

This is a transcription of the Business901 Podcast, The Strength of an Architect is in their Collaborative Abilities. The podcast was with Zachary Evans, an architect and partner at Kelty Tappy Design, Inc, a Fort Wayne architecture, planning, and urban design firm. A Ball State University graduate (Muncie, Indiana), Zach holds professional architectural registrations in Indiana and Ohio and is certified by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB).

An excerpt from the transcription:

Joe: Is there a way that you set expectations of projects?

Zachary: Absolutely. That's why the early customer involvement is extremely important. We try to spend a lot of time educating the client on what our process is. Every architect and every design firm has a different process that they like to go through and they involve different timelines. We try to lay all that out upfront, typically verbally and in written proposals so they can take it home with them or take it back to their business and absorb it a little bit. But managing expectations upfront is key. If you get down the road in a design project and the owner's upset for some reason because it took too long or they thought they were going to get a different product at the end. It's really the design team's fault for not being outgoing and aggressive in engaging the client and making sure their expectations were managed properly.

The tag line was part of a twitter exchange with @ingvald thanks!

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

The Other Half of the Lean and Sales Marketing Summit

I am honored to be included on the same agenda with noted author, speaker, and lean pioneer Bill Waddell. On April 17th, Bill will be presenting Aligning the Entire Organization to Achieve the Sales Strategy.

In most traditionally managed companies Sales and Marketing are treated as an independent entity tasked with increasing sales volume – building the ‘top line’ – while production is apart and tasked with fulfilling whatever is sold and deriving ways to reduce costs. Accounting is apart, disengaged with either, and acts as the scorekeeper. Sales levels go up and down, buffeted by the winds of the economy, the success or failure of new products, and reacting to the actions of local and global competitors. Production pursues lean efforts that typically sound a lot more effective in terms of bottom line impact than they actually are, invest in computer based solutions that actually solve very little, and focus on labor efficiency maximization. Accounting sits off to the side tracking variances, recommending price increases, headcount reductions and outsourcing – ideas of little practical value.

See Bill in this short video, a great preview of what you will see:

The host of this event is Lean Frontiers. They provide high-quality, laser-focused events aimed at integrating organizational silos in support of the lean enterprise. These focused events provide an ideal venue for like-minded professionals to explore the common issues they face in supporting lean. Upcoming Workshops will held in Fishers, IN (Indianapolis Suburb).

The next day, I will be presenting Using Lean to Create Repeatable and Scalable Sales and Marketing Systems: A Customer Centric Approach Through Lean. This workshop will be two-thirds presentation and one-third interactive exercises. If you buy my book series before the event and attend, I will refund the purchase. Marketing with Lean Series – 4 Pack.

Hope to see you there!

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Blending Appreciative Inquiry and Continuous Improvement

This is a transcription of the Business901 Podcast, Is Appreciative Inquiry the next step for Continuous Improvement?. Ankit Patel, principal partner with The Lean Way Consulting firm while doing some work with the Cleveland Clinic, discovered Appreciative Inquiry and saw an opportunity to blend it with his work in Continuous Improvement. An excerpt of the podcast can be found on this blogpost, Connecting Continuous Improvement and Appreciative Inquiry.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Framing the Act of Innovation, as an Act of Empathizing

In my Continuous Improvement journey into the Sales and Marketing field, I have taken Service Design as one of the leading concepts. One of the areas that is most evident in Service Design and Design Thinking is the aspect of Empathy. Seung Chan Lim, nicknamed SLIM has engrossed himself into a special project that I have found rather unique. The project name is Realizing Empathy and below is an excerpt from the upcoming podcast.

Slim: What's really funny is... Basically, I would almost categorize myself as an empirical researcher. Because as much as I love books and if you come to my place you'll see so many books, I don't really read them as much as I probably should. I'm much more of an experiential person. So taking classes and acting is like another way of understanding, what does it mean to act instead of reading a book about it. I decided to just do it. Basically, what I learned in acting class is that it broke my preconceived notion of the idea that acting is pretending. To a certain degree, yes; there is a pretend in it. But by and large, what actors do is they try to bring in their own experiences and bring it into the moment when they're on stage. But they do it under a frame. They do it under the name of some other character that's inside a play.

They do it in a situation that is not their own. But what they're really doing is they're accessing their own personal experience, triggering them in the moment. So when the audience sees it, they may think it's the character doing it, but they feel that what they're doing is real because it is real. They're trying their very best to be true to themselves.

That's a very different way of thinking about acting. Because what they're doing is they're empathizing both in real time with what the character's going through, and also before, during rehearsals, they're constantly trying to understand what it is that this character, this writer has written, is really trying to do because the words don't really tell you enough.

You have to have gestures. You have to have facial expressions. All these other nuances have to be coincided with the words for it to really work as a remarkable piece of artwork that moves the audience and gets them to think about things differently. It wasn't until I took that acting class that the word empathy entered into my equation.

Website: http://realizingempathy.com/
Facebook: http://facebook.com/realizempathy/

Slim’s model talks about framing the act of making not as an act of innovation, but as an act of empathizing. The model suggests a new direction for design. It might be quite leap, or is it?

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Plan your Show and Tell - Mindmap on Prototyping

At some point and time, you have to turn your idea into a reality. The best way is to get feedback as early as possible even at the pen paper stage, Your First Prototype is with Pen and Paper. Most of us are bias about our idea and even in the way we perceive and interpret the data. This is why having a structured approach to prototyping is imperative. Without one, we typically see what we want to see. As a result, we gain confirmation versus additional knowledge.

You must be very open to feedback at this stage. You must welcome complaints and criticisms from others. If you take an honest and positive approach in gaining feedback from others, you will have increased your odds of success and gain the valuable information needed.

The instinctive type approach is surprisingly rather closed to alternatives. As a result the outcome is frequently flawed or less effective than a structured approach. In The Thinker’s Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving book outlines six steps of the problem with intuitive problem solving:

We commonly begin our analysis of a problem by formulating our conclusions; we thus start at what should be the end of the analytic process.

Our analysis usually focuses on the solution which we intuitively favor; we therefore give inadequate attention to alternative solutions.

The solution we intuitively favor is more often than not the first one that seems satisfactory.

We tend to confuse “discussing/thinking hard” about a problem with “analyzing” it (these2 activities are not at all the same).

We focus on the substance (evidence, arguments, and conclusions) and not on the process of our analysts.

Most people are functionally illiterate when it comes to structuring their analysis.

If you would like to download the PDF, Prototype.

If people have not learned and understood problem solving techniques, they cannot formulate a reasonable conclusion. It is a guess and a reaction based simply on intuition. Building the prototype is the easy part. Breaking them, testing them and learning from them is the important part. In a recent read, Prototyping: A Practitioner's Guide, I found author Todd Warfel description of the process outstanding. Though the book may lend itself more to the UI/UX/IX and other software designers, I found the book fascinating and so grounded in foundational principles that I would recommend it for anyone. The majority of the Mindmap below is a result of my interpretation of the book.

The reporting process I recommend for most prototyping is using a basic A3 for structure. This way you outline your process in a clear and concise manner.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

A Collaborative approach to Value Stream Mapping

Value Stream Mapping has been a practice that was first introduced in the book Learning to See: Value Stream Mapping to Add Value and Eliminate MUDA by Mike Rother and John Shook. This groundbreaking workbook, which has introduced the value-stream mapping tool to thousands of people around the world, breaks down the important concepts of value-stream mapping into an easily grasped format. Dan Jones and Jim Womack followed that book with Seeing the Whole Value Stream which took the mapping methodology through an improvement process that converted the traditional value stream of isolated operations to a broader view of the entire value stream.

Recently the co-authors, Womack and Jones in response to feedback asking for examples in other sectors and questions about how to understand supply chain costs more accurately, have added five essays to the book for this new edition. These essays demonstrate how real companies have taken on the challenge of improving their extended value streams working in collaboration with their suppliers and customers.

The new essays for the book are:

Spreading value-stream thinking from manufacturers to final customers through service providers—extending the wiper example.
Applying extended value-stream thinking to retail—a look at the Tesco story.
Learning to use value-stream thinking collaboratively with suppliers and customers.
Product costing in value-stream analysis.
Seeing and configuring the global value stream.

The one particular essay that stood out to me was Learning to use value-stream thinking collaboratively with suppliers and customers. The objective of this effort was to garner their suppliers and customer in a true collaborative effort to create value. It was the first time any of these five companies had ever viewed a shared value stream. They started with a few modest objectives for improvement. However, it turned into much more than an improvement effort but rather a deeper type of organizational relationship. The reason they cited was that they learned how to communicate with each other. You can view the experience: Video of Matthew Lovejoy's presentation on the Acme Alliance story.

This story exemplifies the power of collaboration and what can be developed from it. Collaboration in a Value Stream Mapping exercise can be a difficult process. You open your doors to all the skeletons you have in the closet for both vendors and customers to see. Most people are surprised by the reactions. It is typically not one of disgust or insecurity but rather a helping hand is extended and many times consideration that certain requirements may not even be needed.

The spirit of this venture serves a valuable insight that co-producing, co-creation and open innovation is not as far-fetched as it may seem. A single Value Stream Mapping process led to four years of increasing engagement. I wonder what would happen is they shorten that iteration a bit?

P.S. If your 1^st edition of the book looks like mine, it’s time for the 2^nd edition anyway.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

The Difference In Lean Problem Solving for Sales and Marketing

The transformation of Lean into Sales and Marketing has a few subtleties and one of them is the way you go about solving problems. The typical Lean Thinker goes about solving a problem very systematically using a variety of processes such as A3s, PDCA, 8D or DMAIC, etc. They are all based on the scientific method and the steps are:

Define a Problem
Do Background Research
Construct a Hypothesis
Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
Communicate Your Results

In contrast, Sales and Marketing people have a tendency to make an initial exploration which I phrase EDCA or Explore-Do-Check-Act versus the scientific method of PDCA or Plan-Do-Check-Act. I prefer to use the word Adjust over Act. This initial step seems relatively the same but the real difference comes in the framing of the context. The engineer or scientist views it as a problem-solve analysis. Sales and Marketing solve from a solution-focused synthesis.

Paraphrased from Nigel Cross’s book, Engineering Design Methods: Strategies for Product Design:

Designers tend to use conjectures about solution concepts as the means of developing their understanding of the problem. Designers impose a primary generator and generate early solution concepts. This is used to base a tightly restricted set of constraints or solution possibilities. The problem cannot be fully understood in isolation from the solution, so solution conjectures should be used as a means to understand and explore the problem formulation. As the architect, Richard MacCormac has said, “What you need to know about the problem only becomes apparent as you’re trying to solve it.”

Solution-focused strategies are perhaps the best way of tackling sales and marketing problems which are by nature ill-defined problems. The major hindrance to this type of thinking is found in becoming fixated on a particular early solution concept and an unwillingness to discard the concept. Instead the make minor improvements rather than discard the work and stat with a fresh idea. Another problem is going too much in depth versus staying at a minimum level to continue the process. You should look to having a “reflective conversation with the situation,” so wonderfully said by Schon.

Cross added these steps for the solution focused process:

Clarify requirements by asking sets of related questions which focus on problem structure.
Actively searched for information and critically check given requirements.
Summarize information on the problem formulation into requirement and partially prioritize them.
Do not suppress first solution ideas, hold on to them and return to them to clarify the problem rather than pursuing them in depth.
Detach themselves during conceptual design stages from fixation on early solution concepts.
Produce variants but limited the production and overview periodically assessing and evaluating in order to reduce the number of possible variants.

Another part of the process, especially used by designers and architects is the act of sketching. They have a tendency through sketching to handle different levels of detail shifting from overall concept to detailed aspect practically simultaneously. Sketching permits tentative solutions to be explored and investigated and the typical hierarchy steps of problem-solving analysis are prevented.

In marketing, think of exploring a customer journey map allowing for multiple paths to be explored. For example think of a user scenario that might help you identify multiple paths. A few ideas on constructing one:

Practice being a user. A good exercise is to use de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats and apply that thinking taking different user points of views.
Observe users in action. Insure you are watching both novices and experience people.
Question users about their experience. You can use a variety of methods that are formal, unstructured and even focused groups.
Create user personas and scenarios. A persona is about a well-defined but hypothetical user and a scenario is a storyline about the use of a product or service.

In Sales and Marketing evolving to an answer though customer interaction is one of the best methods of problem solving. You may have to accept a solution that may not be the best in your mind. But an idea that can be implemented is much better than one that cannot be.

Friday, March 2, 2012

Lean Software & Systems Conference

Three Events, One Venue - 3-Day Conference, Lean Camp & Lean Tutorials
Lean Software & Systems Conference 2012 (LSSC12) May 13-18, 2012, in Boston, MA

LSSC 2012 Boston is bringing three premiere events to one centralized location to facilitate the next wave of ideas in methods, process and organization for software & systems engineering development. Boston is the premiere place to be for those innovating in the Lean community.

The Lean Software and Systems Conference emphasizes Lean concepts representing the next wave of ideas in methods, process and organization for software and systems engineering. It brings together an international community of practitioners, consultants, thought leaders and authors to cross-pollinate ideas and foster a sense of community for those promoting better economic and sociological outcomes in their workplace.

Steven Spear, Gregory Howell, and Yochai Benkler will be appearing as the keynote speakers for LSSC 2012 Boston. As some of the leading minds in today’s ever-expanding lean software & systems landscape, these speakers will inform, engage, and inspire LSSC attendees.More details about these speakers and LSSC12 are available on the conference website at http://lssc12.leanssc.org.

The Lean Software and Systems Conference focuses on Lean, Pull Systems and the Kanban Method and how each can be used to improve predictability, frequency of delivery, risk management and quality. Kanban is a term used to describe a type of pull system and is originally found in lean manufacturing. In Kanban for knowledge work, development processes are streamlined by better coordination driven primarily by improved visibility and greater focus on highest value work. Knowledge work environments such as software development have special challenges since inefficiencies are harder to pinpoint due to the absence of physical inventory and the constant variation in the work produced.

I have the honor to be one of the invited speakers and I have a very difficult act to follow, Steve Denning’s, author of the book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century. My topic will be Is Lean still on the Wagon or is it Ready to Fly?.

Other Speakers that have participated in the Business901 Podcast: David Anderson, Jim Benson, Steve Denning, Alan Shalloway, Yuval Yeret, Dean Leffingwell and Claudio Perrone.

P.S. If you can’t make Boston there are still a few seats left for the Indianapolis Lean Sales and Marketing Summit on April 17th and 18th.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

An Inquiry into the Meaning of Making

This Business901 Podcast featured Seung Chan Lim, nicknamed SLIM. We discussed his journey and finally his project, Realizing Empathy. Through this project Slim hopes to share ideas, tools, and other ways to facilitate a meaningful, sustainable, and constructive conversations between and among diverse perspectives whether that's between people or between people and materials or between people and machines by using "making" as the shared metaphor.

Realizing Empathy is a project that asks what it means to make something, how it works as a process, and why it matters to our lives. Slim believe that making is a process that is shared across cultures and disciplines. Slim told me, “People use different words like "experimenting", "painting", "acting", "directing", "dancing", "choreographing", "writing", "translating", "crafting", etc... but what I have found is that the underlying principles are identical. Not only that, but there's a direct line of connection between making and empathizing, which is at the heart of how we form meaningful relationship with everything we come in contact with.”

You will find this podcast very different and very engaging.