How a Connected Company Works

Dave Gray of The Dachis Group and author of a recent book,The Connected Company works with the world's leading companies to develop and execute winning strategies. His previous book, Gamestorming, sold more than 50,000 copies and has been translated into 16 languages.

This video is an hour long but discusses much of the content in the book. He makes a case for why services are important and how they need to be created and managed in the world today. He also makes the correlation on why manufacturing is no longer the caveat that many of us think it is. An hour worth spending.

His discussion on The Law of Requisite Variety is part of my discussion in next weeks blog. The law basically states that any control system must be capable of variety that’s greater than or equal to the variety of the system to be controlled.  From the book;

In other words, if there is variety in the environment, you need enough variety in your system to absorb it effectively. Imagine you are throwing balls at a juggler and the juggler is trying to keep them all in the air. No matter how skilled the juggler, there will always be a point at which there are too many possible states for the juggler's mind and hands to maintain control. At some point, you will either need to reduce the number of balls, or you will need more jugglers.

He goes on to say:

Customers have a tendency to resist standardization. The more you try to standardize their service requests, the more you will anger them. Not a good recipe for customer satisfaction or long-term business growth.

Listen to Dave’s spin on it and next week you will hear mine.

How to unite Development and Operations?

DevOps is becoming a familiar word in the world of IT and as a result shifting the focus away from separate departments working independently to an organization-wide collaboration. It’s about addressing all the work as a whole, versus looking only at the bits and pieces, or only looking at capital versus expense.

One of the leaders of the DevOps movemen is Dominica DeGrandis (@dominicad), who teaches and coaches teams using Kanban for IT Operations and Development Operations.  She is an independent consultant as well as an associate of David J. Anderson.  Her background includes ten years of doing Configuration Management, build and deployment automation, and server & environment maintenance, followed by leading teams performing those functions.

I think whether you are a DevOps or just a Kanban fan,  you can take some insight from this podcast. You don’t just have to be in IT to receive value from this conversation. Enjoy the podcast.

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download this episode (right click and save)   or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Mobile Version

Additional conversations with Dominica:

• Audio file on Dominica explaining her Dev/Ops Class
• Another short Audio with Dominica DeGrandis discussing Personal Kanban

More into Social Media? Using Lean Thinking in Social Media

Custom Magnetic & Dry Erase Comic Strip

Do you need a customizable comic strip that lets you create your own comics using magnetic characters? It’s a great start for a service design project and creating a customer experience. It’s part of a Kickstarter project by Erik Heumiller. There are loads of options on the website from $1 to $300.

The Magnet Comic is a dry-erase comic strip that uses magnetic characters with a variety of different facial expressions to make the comics you want to make. It also lets you make comics a part of your every day life whether at home or work because it's a physical comic you can display and interact with.

Kickstarter is a funding platform for creative projects. Everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of ambitious, innovative, and imaginative projects that are brought to life through the direct support of others

Back this Project!

This project will only be funded if at least $6,500 is pledged by Sunday Dec 16, 3:17pm EST.

P.S. Pledge $10 and get a Comic Character of yourself emailed to you.

Should we start having Flip Conferences?

Liz Guthridge is my guest next week on the Business901 Podcast. We did not talk about conferences. We did talk about Smart Mobs, Peer to Peer Networks, Crowdsourcing and how Lean fits into the picture. Liz is the founder of Connect Consulting Group, where she helps leaders implement high-risk strategic initiatives in their organizations. She has expertise in employee communications, research and change leadership. She also serves as a community expert volunteer for Powernoodle, and has facilitated multiple sessions over the past year.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast that spurred my thinking on Flip Conferences.

Joe: Could you explain Smart Mob organizing for me?

Liz: Smart mob organizing came from the book about a decade ago called "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution." Back then the concept was about giving power to the mobile many. Over the past 10 years it's evolved, especially inside organizations, which is where I work and play, about bringing together a group of employees for a common business purpose. You generally use technology and electronic media or classic technology like the Powernoodle I mentioned. One of the advantages of doing it with the technology as opposed to in person is that you can cast a wider net and get more people to participate in more geographical areas. You don't have to all be in person. You can hear more diverse voices because of that, especially the ones who are quiet, who are not necessarily going to speak up in you're in a face‑to‑face session.

It's also really well when you want to do something really quickly because you could run a session, get people to generate ideas. You can do it in, depending upon the complexity, as little as 90 minutes or so from start to finish. Or you could spread it out over a week or several weeks, depending upon how much people need to do, think about it, and do other things.

So for example, I recently did for one of the professional associations I work with, they were doing their, and again, it's kind of embarrassing for them to admit, first strategic plan. They were gathering in the Bay Area, which is not too far from where I am, but we only had basically that seven hours to work in total. They had to have a regular meeting as well, a business meeting.

So what we did through Powernoodle was to do a SWOT analysis, and we did a SWOT analysis with a double T, not only looking at threads but also trends. So I had a question for each. They had a committee set up to be working on their mission statement, and that committee had gotten totally bogged down. So we did a smart mob organizing around the mission statement.

So by the time they got together in the Bay Area and we had finished the smart mob organizing and I had looked at all the data, put it together for them in a report which we presented, we were able to come up with a very sound, strategic plan. Basically, a one‑pager was objectives, goals, and tactics in five hours.

Joe:  It sounds like that reverse learning‑type thing where you bring the homework into the classroom.

Liz:  Exactly. It's perfect for flip learning, yes.

Joe: You're having discussions about things they value rather than taking the time out to explain this or do this survey or do this. You're jumping in with both feet when you walk into the room, aren't you?

Liz: Exactly. That's why I think one of the things that flip learning is so effective as well as the smart mob organizing type‑techniques. Because, what you're able to do is to level set in advance because people are working with concrete material, not just fluffy ideas but concrete stuff, and are getting much more comfortable with the concepts, a better idea of where they think the organization should go or the team should go. So when they come together, either on a phone call or a video conference or in person, you're able to have a much more thorough conversation, a richer or more robust conversation. You have a real dialogue rather than talking at one another.

In past podcasts, Opening Appreciative Space Process 1 and Opening Appreciative Space Process 2, we discussed Open Space Technology (OST) is an approach for hosting meetings, conferences, corporate-style retreats, symposium, and community summit events, focused on a specific and important purpose or task—but beginning without any formal agenda, beyond the overall purpose or theme.

Having an open space conference is scary for many conference promoters. However, what would happen if we did a Flip Conference? I envision it working something like this:

1. Create a conference agenda very similar to the same way that you do now with subject matter tracts and experts filling the agenda.
2. After registration, attendees are allowed to watch the presentation before attending the event. They can even hold a corporate viewing so that discussions from non-attendees can take place.
3. Form an online group utilizing something like Powernoodle or another Wikki type structure to discuss beforehand.
4. From these conversations vote for other attendees to give 5-minute lightning round discussions.
5. At the conference, the subject matter expert discusses the findings or information summarized in the online conversation and adds a few other tidbits.
6. Present the Lightning Rounds as the subject matter for discussion. Maybe limit these discussions for 15 to 30 minutes.
7. The Facilitator/Subject Matter expert wraps up the discussion.
8. The online community continues for a pre-determined period and if it needs to evolve into an ongoing community it has that choice.  

Anybody up for trying? Drop me an email if you have an interest on a smaller scale a Lean Sales and Marketing Workshop or a Lean Service Design Trilogy  presented as a Flip Workshop?

Lean as your Business Model

Art Byrne has been implementing Lean strategy in various U.S.-based manufacturing and service companies, such as Danaher Corporation, for more than 30 years, including The Wiremold Company, which he ran for 11 years. He now serves as Operating Partner at the private equity firm J. W. Childs Associates L.P.

Art recently wrote the book, The Lean Turnaround: How Business Leaders Use Lean Principles to Create Value and Transform Their Company that is said to be the c-level guide to succeeding with Lean. I believe that is an injustice to the book. I believe that anyone that is serious about implementing Lean in any part of the organization can benefit from this book. It is about Lean as a business process or what fuels the fire of a Lean implementation. Below is an excerpt from the podcast, Lean as your Business Model that will post next week.

Joe:  The one big overall thought I had from the book, is that you practically view Lean from just about an appreciative inquiry point of view, what you do well, what are the value adding activities? That's like heresy sometimes, what many consider Lean thinking. I think the first thing when someone thinks about Lean, they think about waste reduction. But, you talk about value adding.

Art:  That's correct. There's a simple definition of, what is a business in the first place, not just a manufacturing business, but any business? It's really a very simplistic thing. It's a collection of people, and a bunch of processes all working to try and deliver value to customers. That's true for any business. It doesn't have to be just manufacturing. Unfortunately, the traditional approach that we've evolved to when we run these businesses, we started out with strategy, and more often than not the strategy is to create shareholder value, which I think starts out by having it all backwards because shareholder value, to me, is a result, not a strategy. It's a result of what you do and the value that you deliver to customers over long periods of time is what's going to improve your shareholder value.

You can't just say, "I'm going to do shareholder value." That's backwards. The other thing that occurs in almost all traditional approaches to a business is we take the value adding part of the business as a given. For example, if you're running a company and you have a six-week lead time, and you've always had a six-week lead time, then that's taken as a given, "OK we've got a six-week lead time. How do we do our strategy around that?"

What we try and do instead is we try and get our customers to conform to what we do, to the fact that we have a sixmonth lead time. Then, of course, we focus very, very heavily on making the month. The traditional management approach is focus on the numbers, and make the month, make the quarter, that kind of thing.

Unfortunately, when you're focused on make the month; you're focusing on something that already happened. You can't do anything about that anymore, it already occurred. That happened last month.
In fact, for most companies, by the time they get the results of last month, they're three weeks into this month. Effectively, we're always trying to drive the car through the rear view mirror when you look at it that way. The reality, however, is the opposite of that.

The value is created by a couple of things, one, by improving your own value adding activities. Two, by delivering more value to your customer than your competitors can. Three, by conforming what you do to your customers to satisfy them and make you stand out verses your competition. It's really this opposite...value is created by the opposite of the traditional approach, if you will.

I always like to use the example of a simple thing that productivity equals wealth. Productively, this is true for countries, for companies, for anything. Productivity always equals wealth. If you think of the industrial revolution in England, if you think about why the United States has become so powerful, it's all really because of productivity.

A Lean strategy allows you to get big improvements in your value adding activities, which is basically productivity. It's a way to get productivity by focusing on your value adding activities. As you get these, this creates the opportunity for you to grow and to gain to gain market share, which is particularly important in times like this when the economy is really flat and slow and people are struggling to get any kind of sales growth.

The Lean approach gives you the opportunity to do that by focusing on your value adding. I look at Lean really as the greatest wealth creator that was ever invented. But most people just look at it as a bunch of tools, as I said before. It's a whole bunch of tools in a tool kit.

We can roll then out when we want to use them. If we don't feel like using them...if you look at most manufacturing companies, they say they're going to do Lean, and most of them will start where they're trying to do Kanban, just because they can understand Kanban a little bit better than some of the other stuff. They won't do setup reduction.

They won't do some of the other fundamental things. They'll try and do Kanban, without doing all the other things first, you don't get much cane out of doing Kanban. But, that's the approach that a lot of people take.

I think you really have to understand Lean as strategic to really understand what's possible here. I can give you a really simple example of that, which is, if I just gave you an example that said, we got Company A and Company B; they buy the same equipment from the same manufacturer, so they run at the same speed. Everything is equal. They don't have anything different...as Company B can change the equipment over in one minute, and Company A takes an hour.

If each of them can only afford an hour a day to change that equipment over, then if I asked you who has the lowest cost, and who has the best customer service, A or B, it becomes pretty clear to most people that the guy with the one minute setup is going to have lower cost. He's going to have tremendously better customer service because of his ability to respond quickly.

He decides to leverage that by offering a two-day lead time, when Company A and the rest of the industry has a sixweek lead time. He's going to start to gain market share. Company A's first reaction is probably going to be to build more inventory so that he can offer a short lead time. That's just going to drive his cost up. Or, if that doesn't work, he's going to start to cut the price which also hurts his cost structure and his profitability.

Something that most people would look at clearly as a manufacturing thing, setup reduction, turns out that it's going to give me lower cost and better customer service, two very strategic things. That might give you a little insight into why, Lean at its core, is a very, very strategic thing. That's part of the point that we're trying to make with the book here is that applying the Lean tools and doing this...there's some tremendous results that you can get from this.

Sales Process Engineering is not Lean Sales and Marketing

Joseph Juran observed, "There should be no reason our familiar principles of quality and process engineering would not work in the sales process." In Management of a Sales Force, a sales process is presented as consisting of eight steps. These are:

1. Prospecting/Initial contact
2. Pre-approach planning the sale
3. Approach
4. Need assessment
5. Presentation
6. Meeting objections
7. Gaining commitment
8. Follow-up

This is your typical marketing funnel or a sales process describing an approach to selling a product or service. We may even choose to call it sales process engineering. Along comes a Lean consultant or a Six Sigma Black Belt saying that we can apply Lean or Six Sigma to the sales process. What they are really saying is that they can show you how to engineer the process. If they are somewhat current, they will throw in discussions about agile, iterations, uncertainty and flexibility. But they are still trying to engineer the process. I know this all too well; I have done the same.

I started out creating product/markets or value streams. The next step of the process is to map the customer journey and then start defining the individual reaction or internal processes to it. The rational for having a well thought-out sales process is that you can standardize customer interaction. From a consultant's (internal or external) view , it offers the opportunity to use design and improvement tools from other disciplines such as product development (Agile) and manufacturing (Quality). It is a good learning exercise and helps you understand your process and may even be a starting point to help you understand your customers. However, it is a mistake to create a sales and marketing process around this thinking. As you may know from my previous writings, Kill the Sales and Marketing Funnel, I believe linear planning will increase the risk for a customer to engage in an inappropriate course of action. I encourage you to read that post before continuing.

In today’s world, you may not know or be able to identify the decision makers anymore. Decisions are being made in committee and every one of those committee members are influenced by many others. It is becoming a very collaborative process. There are still people that carry more influence than others though it is not the perceived hierarchy that an organizational chart depicts. Rather, it is through a network of tangible and intangible deliverables, a network of value.

The conversation is at the heart of the Sales and Marketing process. Through the above mapping exercise, you should not be attempting to find a step by step process rather you should be identifying the conversation and interactions and prioritizing the moments of truths that take place. Just as Lean in the 3P process development process has moved away from stage gate reviews to an event, see blog post, Eliminate your Stage Gates in favor of Events, we need to make a similar move in sales and marketing. I prefer not to call it an event rather a conversation as I described in blog post, Sales and Service Planning with PDCA. A conversation of wiling participants who have demonstrated a willingness to address a job that needs to be done. This conversation has several paths one of discovery through CAPD and another through continuous improvement of PDCA. It is not restricted to a funnel that will limit participants and the sharing of knowledge.

You may ask, how does that deliver sales? What is the ROI of the Lean Sales and Marketing? Dave Gray, discusses this type of hierarchy and sales structure in his new book, The Connected Company. He calls this structure a POD. In the book, he mentions a few companies like Amazon and 3M that operate in this manner. He also mentions Semco, a Brazilian conglomerate that has grown from $4 to $200 million or Rational who was acquired by IBM for 2.1 billion and others. Whether you call them Pods or Value Stream Teams it makes little difference. They are built through a clearly defined vision and supporting processes that empower them in the conversation they have with customers.

Enabling the Lean Service Design Trilogy

This is the introduction page to the Trilogy Module of the Lean Service Design Trilogy Course. There is a special offer located on the page. 

First, I would like to emphasis the importance of knowing, understanding how a customer/prospect views and uses your Service Products. In the Service/Train module, I introduced the pyramid of the Progressions of Economic Value and Valuable Intelligence from the book, The Experience Economy. Each level of economic value corresponds to a level of valuable intelligence (commodities to noise, goods to data, etc.).

From the book:

While the economic offering becomes more and more intangible with each step up the next echelon, the value of the offering becomes more and more tangible. Economists often talk about the line of intangibility between goods and services to which we add the line of memorability before experiences and the line of sustainability before transformations. Goods and services remain outside of the individual, while experiences actually reach inside of the individual to the value of the offering.

They go on to say:

Nothing is more important, more abiding, or more wealth-creating than the wisdom required transforming customers. And nothing will command as high a price.

In the book Idealized Design, the authors used a similar hierarchy for the key terms involved in describing organizational learning. They are as follows:

• Data consist of symbols that represent the properties of objects and events. They have little value until they have been processed into information Data are to information as iron ore is to iron. Little can be done with iron ore until it is processed into iron.
• Information consists of data that has been processed to be useful. It is contained in descriptions, answers to question beginning with such words as what, who, when, when, and how many.
• Knowledge is contained in instructions, answers to how-to questions.
• Understanding is contained in explanations, answers to the why questions.
• Wisdom is concerned with the value of outcomes, effectiveness, whereas the other four types of mental content are concerned with efficiency. Efficiency is concerned with doing things right; effectiveness is concerned with doing the right thing.

These key terms can help you in developing user stories and understanding how a customer may view your service offering. Do not underestimate the value of understanding current state. It serves as a guideline to communicate the opportunities so they may be prioritized and then acted upon. It helps build a shared and consistent understanding of the customer’s experience of your process and of your business as a whole. Understanding where your service product fits into the hierarchy above is one of the first steps in creating and effective Service Product.

Secondly, you should pay particular attention to identify critical control points (moments of truth) or interfaces with the customer. These critical points deserve special consideration as they typically will be the deciding factor for your customers. You may ask what they will look like. I typically find two obvious areas are the cause of most concern. First is the area of flow. If your service process does not flow well in its delivery to the customer, it seldom flows well for the customer. Your service must be in sync with the customer’s ability to react to the moment. A crystal ball would be great but if your typical customer takes three months to make a decision about your service, trying to accelerate or stretch that process out will seldom prove successful.

Thirdly, a clear-cut understanding of how that service meets your customer’s needs is imperative. A strong value proposition is the first step in building a successful service product. Many organizations struggle with this concept and do not utilize the tools available to understand their service product from the customers’ viewpoint. They are in love with what they do. Understanding how your customer perceives your position in the marketplace relative to your competition may be the single most important issue you face.

Many organizations try to build their first service product journeys into a simple stream. I encourage breaking it down and allow for exceptions but don’t spend the energy scrutinizing each and every one. Seldom will your organization’s service products be so clear-cut that have one customer journey. Many of the answers to these exceptions will be found as you take the deeper dive into the primary journey. One of the powers of mapping the customer journey is that it enables the team to see the entire picture. This coincides with the fundamental Lean thinking of optimizing the entire process versus the individual stages.

P.S. Many times exceptions are a result of limited resources. If this is a new service product, I would start by suggesting that you have unlimited resources then ask what the structure would look like.

Fourthly, respect your people. Trust your team knows how to improve their process more than anyone else. They can tell you if the paperwork, request for proposals, and specifications are flowing. They know the degree of misunderstandings that are occurring internally and with customers. And always remember, the customer experience will mimic the employee experience.

The fundamental goal should be one of discovery, learning and adaptability with a shared responsibility for a successful outcome. That implies that it is all about engaging both organizations into effective problem-solving and learning. In applying this, think of the customer journey in terms of a series of iterative loops of problem solving and knowledge creation. Taking this approach, each iterative cycle should be built around (adapted from the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development”):

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Content-rich material over-elaborate promotion
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Response to changing customer needs over following a plan

In ‘The no-nonsense guide to standardized work’, Robert Thompson explains;

Employees, not ‘outsiders’, study the jobs they know intimately in order to uncover best practices and create methodologies for continuous process improvement. Thus they become responsible for solving problems and own the standards that result.

In a Dennis Stevens post, Does Process Discipline Really Reduce Creativity?, he says:

Something I find interesting is the push back. I hear from Agile developers that process discipline will inhibit their creativity. They say, “Software development is a creative activity. If you put process rigor around it you will inhibit our creativity.” I have heard others complain about applying Lean concepts to software development. “This isn’t manufacturing,” they say, “There is no place for standard work in what we do.

These are the same arguments that I hear time and time again in developing standards for sales and marketing and service processes. The importance of standard work is that it is the starting point to create efficient and effective ways to communicate with your potential customers. Standard work begins with understanding the customer. We determine customer requirements and make sure we can deliver on those requirements. Delivering on these requirements consistently means that we need to be in control of our processes.  And simply stated, we are only in control of our processes when we have documented procedures.

Lean 3P is PDCA on Steroids

Well said by author Allan R. Coletta of a new book The Lean 3P Advantage: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Production Preparation Process. Development of the 3P process is attributed to Chichiro Nakao, a former Toyota group manager and the founder of Shingijutsu company. The accepted meaning of 3P is Production, Preparation, Process.

Allan is a chemical engineer with an extensive background in manufacturing operations, supply chain and engineering, gained while working in the chemical process and healthcare diagnostics industries. Allan is a practitioner more so than an author, and I believe you will enjoy that perspective in the podcast.

Toyota delivers product designs on schedule 98% of the time (as stated by @flowchainsensei on twitter). Now, I am not sure how I can confirm this statement except that I believe this source to be accurate and even if Bob was 50% wrong, it would mean Toyota still exceeds the majority. However, after interviewing Allan and reading the book, I can understand and believe that statement. This is an excerpt from the book:

Lean 3P is a powerful enabler for invention and innovation because it creates a structure and a process for people to create both independently and collaboratively. However, 3P is not presented as a "one size fits all" means of creating brilliant new products that takes us from "blue sky" to product launch. It might work like that in some instances where a new product is a variation of an established product or in organizations where the same team is inventing, developing, and working together to launch a new product. With additional experience the role of 3P in the full product development will likely expand. For companies new to Lean 3P, the question might be how 3P will integrate into existing product development processes.

A recent blog post, Applying Lean in the Lean 3P Design Process contains a written excerpt from the podcast.

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download this episode (right click and save) or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

I talked to Allan for a rather long time and had to shorten the podcast. I chose to cut his acknowledgments of several people that include Andy Johnson, Maria Stopher, Ken Rolfes and two former Business901 podcast guests, Drew Locher and Ron Masticelli. I apologize to any that he mentioned and I failed to here.   

Allan’s Lean experience started while serving as Site Manager for ICI Uniqema’s largest Specialty Chemicals plant in North America and continued to expand is his role as Senior Director of Engineering for Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics. His passion for manufacturing and engaging people in continuous improvement continues to grow through personal application of Lean principles. Allan serves on the Delaware Manufacturing Extension Partnership’s Fiduciary and Advisory Boards, and is a member of the Delaware Business Mentoring Alliance. He is also a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME).

Should Innovation be driven by Capabilities?

Innovating in services is the escape route from the commodity trap and a solution for growth, giving firms a significant competitive advantage. As they innovate into the future, companies must think beyond their products and move outside their own four walls to innovate. –says Henry Chesbrough’s, author Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era.

I am a firm believer that Standard Work is the 1st step of innovation followed closely by continuous improvement. Detailed in the blog post, The Lean Innovation Engine–Turn the Key. In summary:

• SDCA: Standard Work that creates a CAN-DO attitude and free up time to spark problem solving.
• Applying PDCA, allows you to “see” opportunities for improvement.
• A Continuous Improvement Culture (Kaizen) catalyzes the creation of stimulating habitats, leveraging the resources in your environment.
• These habitats, along with your attitude, influence the culture in your community (The Customer Experience will mimic the Employee Experience).
• The culture allows for EDCA and the BIG “I” of innovation.

So it is our culture that allows for effective innovation. Why do we believe that out of the box thinking drives the innovation engine. Seldom are we short of great ideas. We are short of the capabilities to deliver on the great ideas. But we proceed and make choices on what we need to “innovate” without this understanding.

In the The Lean Startup, we discuss the idea of the Pivot (a way to adapt and adjust before it’s too late). Many pivots may take place not because of improper product/market fit, but because we lack the capabilities of moving forward  with the idea. Even in mature companies, if our capabilities are not matched to the innovation, we may disband the idea (I think that is one of the values that can be derived through Osterwalder and Pigneur’s Business Model Canvas described in the book, Business Model Generation).

In most of my improvement engagements, I start with a current state map of someone’s existing process. We utilize the Business Model Canvas and future state mapping to “design” the new innovation. We will map out the process first, assigning the resources as needed. This normally exposes our weaknesses and highlights the additional training and outside resources that may be needed. We continue down this path, but why?

Should we consider, internalizing more of the “design” process? Would that help us to better understand the solution that we can design for the customer? Would it allow us to better utilize our existing resources? Would it allow us a better chance of delivery? Would it create a better ROI?

We hear a lot about change and change management but is evolutionary change better for us than disruptive change? Can we have disruptive innovation without disruptive internal change? Will we have any innovation implemented without a thorough understanding of our existing capabilities? I wonder.

Service Design Presentation

 

Marc Stickdorn is one of my favorite resources on Service Design. Even without that endorsement, he has earned his recognition as the co-author of This is Service Design Thinking. Marc appeared on the Business901 podcast, Service Design Thinking Podcast with Marc Stickdorn. Below is an excellent presentation on Service Design with a little Service Dominant Logic mixed In.

 

 

Marc 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. Marc is co-founder and consultant of “Destinable – service design for tourism” and guest lecturer at different business and design schools.

You may be interested in the Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop.