CAP-Do: Connecting Demand to the Lean Supply Chain

CAP-Do: What makes CAP-Do so attractive is that it assumes we do not have the answers.  It allows us to create a systematic way to address the problems (pain) or opportunities (gain) from the use of our products and services. CAP-Do is an emergent process. You may know the outcomes that you desire but that is relatively unimportant in today’s world or The Challenger Model. It is the outcomes that your customer requires and how you adapt to his/her processes to produce their needed results. This takes a willingness to discover as you go versus leading the way. The essence of Pausing or as Peter Senge calls it “Presencing” is the act of acknowledging that there is more than right a answer. We refrained from trying to find answers or problem-solve in the Check and Adjust stage. We can now gather and understand the actions, roles and uses of our product/services. This is the stage where the connection between supply and demand occurs. Most organizations try to choose between what we know (Check) and what we learned (Adjust). The key though is acceptance and understanding or as I have explained earlier; empathy. This empathetic connection is important; not only to our customer, but as an external team we must also empathize with our internal organization. It is this preparation, done with a pause, before we move into the planning stage that is imperative. As we cycle or iterate between the supply and the demand world we will discover complementary answers. The obstacles will get smaller and smaller. The organization that instills the CAP-Do process will put a tremendous amount of faith in the Sales and Marketing teams. These teams must work and overcome the tension between supply and demand. CAP-Do is a Lean process that supports the tenants of Service Dominant Logic and Jobs to be Done. It requires a fundamental understanding of the idea that there is not one single answer in this world for any problem. The answers lie with the people that are addressing the problem at the moment and have a particular job-to-get-done. It is in understanding their needs and their outcomes with greater wisdom. More fundamentally, you create a way to get your own job done in any situation.

If you would to purchase CAP- Do, it is available for download as a PDF.

Chapter Outlines:

Check Chapter 1 - Structural Conflicts Chapter 2 - Enterprise Thinking Chapter 3 - A Learning Process, not a Teaching Process Adjust (Act) Chapter 4 - A Perspective of Strength Based Principles Chapter 5 - Lean and the OODA Loop Pause Chapter 6 – Pause Plan Chapter 7 - Lean Sales Methods Chapter 8 - Retool your Sales and Marketing with Lean Do Chapter 9 - Experiment through Prototypes Chapter 10 - Lean Thoughts Chapter 11 - Doing CAP-Do Chapter 12 - CAP-Do Process – Working with SDCA, PDCA, EDCA

CAP-Do is included in the Marketing with Lean Book Series at no additional cost.

Uncovering Compelling Insights

Steve Portigal. author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, is the founder of  Portigal Consulting. He has interviewed hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, hotel maintenance staff, architects, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of mobile devices, medical information systems, music gear, wine packaging, financial services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories.

Steve speaks regularly at corporate events and conferences such as CHI, IxDA, Lift, SXSW, UIE, UPA, UX Australia, UX Hong Kong, UX Lisbon, and WebVisions. His articles about culture, design, innovation, and interviewing users have been published in interactions, Core77, Ambidextrous, and Johnny Holland. He blogs at www.portigal.com/blog and tweets at @steveportigal.

Steve was gracious enough to secure a discount code for the book, IUBUSINESS901 for 20% off,  if purchased through Rosenfeld Media, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

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Framing Big Data, part 1 of 2

If you have two sets of researchers who are telling you contradictory things, and they have their own data sets to support it; how do you tell which one is believable and which one is junk. In Numbersense, what I try to do is to give people, as you say, a framework to start thinking about how you would interpret all these things out there.

…says Kaiser Fung, author of a new book, Numbersense a previous book, Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do and the popular blog, Junk Charts. Kaiser Fung is a professional statistician with over a decade of experience applying statistical methods to marketing and advertising businesses. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, in addition to degrees from Princeton and Cambridge Universities. He is Vice President of Business Intelligence and Analytics at Vimeo, a high-quality video hosting platform for creative people. He previously worked at Sirius XM Radio, American Express, [X+1], Exodus Communications, and Sonus Networks. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University teaching practical statistics.

This is the first of two podcasts with Kaiser. The second one will post next week.

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Kranz Dictum: The Miracle behind Apollo 13

Have you ever been part of an impossible project? Next week’s Business901 podcast is Michael Dobson author of Project: Impossible - How the Great Leaders of History Identified, Solved and Accomplished the Seemingly Impossible - and How You Can Too!. The book was a fun read for me and so was the podcast. Michael does an excellent job of weaving project management lessons in and out the stories. Michael, knows a thing or two about project management, he has written over twenty-five books.

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe: When we think of a crisis like that, how much project planning goes into a crisis, such as Tylenol. Were they just winging it in that instance?

Michael: Well, the part of the background of the Tylenol situation was that a lot of the executives of Johnson and Johnson had just gone through training or some workshop about corporate ethics. Their vision and mission statements and all these good management practices and they really only had one question to ask themselves. Did we mean all this stuff that we were saying? Once they said "Yes, we did mean it," then they had a basis to go on. You'll see this as a theme in a couple of stories. In Apollo 13, you know the famous CO2 exchanger that we all remember from the Apollo 13 movie, the fact is that there had been a tremendous amount of training in crisis response, there was an emergency kit. They couldn't very well have done it without duct tape. Somebody had to think about putting together an emergency kit that included things like duct tape that was available generically. With Patton in the Battle of the Bulge, he didn't do it in 48 hours. He anticipated it and had his planners hard at work. With Caesar at the Battle of Alicia, it was the long term training of the Roman soldier that allowed him to take on the absurd task of building this amazing set of fortifications in a very short period of time with very little in the way of supplies. If you don't start early, if you don't have the foundation, if you don't have the vision, if you don't have the training, if you don't have the emergency kit, well, your ability to handle a crisis when it shows up is extremely hampered. Normally, crisis management by definition is reactive rather than proactive, but a lot of training, a lot of the prep work, a lot of the mind-set comes well in advance and in most cases by the time the project officially starts, it's too late. If you haven't started early, if you haven't built a foundation early, well, there's not much you're going to be able to do to recover.

Joe: In the movie Apollo 13, I think of where the person said something to the effect, "gentlemen" . . . .

Michael: Failure is not an option.

Joe: Failure is not an option. Yes, exactly.

Michael: Gene Kranz who never said it. He never said it. What he did do is he was the guy who developed the NASA response following the Apollo 1 capsule fire that killed Grissom, White and Chaffee. There is a long story about the origins of that. Some of it is in the book, and it was after that he developed and announced what he referred to as the Kranz Dictum that was a preparation and mind-set tool for NASA. He insisted and focused on it from the immediate aftermath of Apollo 1. So, by the time Apollo 13 came around, he had achieved what he did call, perfection in the art of crisis management. Simply no way to make space travel or, any kind of, going up explosive powered rocket, there's no way to make that inherently safe. If you're not ready with crisis management, you have no business going.

Gene Kranz did well with something he never said, His book is titled: Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond

MICHAEL SINGER DOBSON, marketing executive, project management consultant and nationally-known speaker, has been a staff member of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, award-winning game designer, and career counselor in his varied career.

A Story of Sustaining Lean

Robert B. Camp holds a bachelor of science degree in engineering from the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, and a master of business administration from Franklin Pierce University, Rindge, New Hampshire. Robert spent almost 20 years of his career working for Mobil and Lockheed Martin. Throughout his career, he has performed roles that have drawn heavily on his increasing body of Lean knowledge and experience. He is a board member of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence and the author of Go and See: A Journey about Getting to Lean, and most recently Sustainable Lean: The Story of a Cultural Transformation.

In the podcast, Robert discusses a particular area that I thought brought out a very clear message. When you are talking culture and transformation, you cannot hire someone else to come in and do your work. An excerpt from the podcast:

Robert Camp: The problem is, they're unsustainable, unless, leadership with the organization agrees that they're going to change. I make a point of referencing that in my book, early in the book, the protagonist, Jim, who is a plant manager is talking to a consultant that he's heard at a gathering, and he approaches him afterwards. Jim approaches the consultant afterwards and says: "I hired these external consultants to come in and we did great. They did better than they even promised me they would do. Then, I was pressured by corporate to cut off the contract, and in the two years since, things seemed to have drifted back to where they had been". Frank, the external consultant, says to him: "What you did wrong was you entrusted the transformation to somebody else. Unless, you are willing to lead it, it's not going to be sustainable". I think, therein lies half of the answer that A is got to be led by the leaders of the organization. The second piece to that is by leading they literally get out front which means they need to understand Lean as well as anybody else and they actually have to drive the transformation. They can't hire somebody to come in and do that for them.

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Shoud we question Big Data?

Kaiser Fung is a professional statistician with over a decade of experience applying statistical methods to marketing and advertising businesses. His acclaimed blog, Junk Charts, pioneered the critical examination of data and graphics in the mass media. Kaiser is my guest next week on the podcast and this is an excerpt from it. Kaiser recently wrote his second book, Numbersense: How to Use Big Data to Your Advantage.

Joe: Before the podcast, we talked about John Paulos. He of course wrote the book,A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper and how he frames what we read in the newspaper. I thought your book did a great job of reframing how – or framing how we should be looking at Big Data without saying who is right or wrong, but putting it in our court saying “We need to frame it.”

Kaiser: I think it is very important people need to realize before they dig into the book is, I focus on a very specific aspect of Big Data which is not receiving enough attention right now. We keep hearing about Big Data and it is like volumes of data, there are all kinds of new types of data. We are tracking everybody, every movement and that is true and an important aspect of it. Much of that aspect is very much what I would call supply folks – it is all about the people who are doing the data work, and the people that are tracking us. My book is focused on the consumption side, so one consequence of having so much data is that it is going to be that there are tons and tons of people who are going to come to us with all kinds of arguments, and they are going to tell us that their argument is supported by such and such data.

For most of us who do data analysis, it is probably even for people who read data analysis, you will realize that you can pretty much find data to support anything you want to say. So what is going to happen; we are going to have a lot of contradiction and confusion. There will be so much data analysis out there; we do not know what to think. In Numbersense, what I try to do is to give people, as you say, a framework to start thinking about how you would interpret all these things out there. If you have two sets of researchers who are telling you contradictory things, and they have their own data sets to support it; how do you tell which one is believable and which one is junk. Like you alluded to this is not an exercise in figuring who is a hundred percent correct and who is not. Our problems are so complex, and the data sets, even though they are so luminous will never be complete. We will never be able to know for sure that, you are right, and he is wrong.

So, I mean I encourage people to take a skeptical attitude, and to basically develop your own framework for interpreting the data analysis out there. I would have expected some people would probably not hundred percent agree with everything that I have say in the book either. That is totally acceptable, that is sort of part of the mentality of how you approach the interpretation of data analysis.

Joe: Well that is really the whole point to it is – really who do we believe, and how do we analyze? If we want to talk about topical discussions, let us just talk about Eric Snowden for a minute. Should we embrace Big Data, or should we be somewhat sceptical and scared of it?

Kaiser: It is interesting because I just put up a blog post this morning – It is about Snapchat. I wrote that blog post, and at the very end, I cited Eric Schmidt, the past CEO of Google. He had a quotation for that I used to think “Oh my god, this is so creepy.” He said something like “There is no privacy anymore if you do not want anyone to know that you have done something, then you should not have done it in the first place.” I used to think that it is like a common trend how creepy this technology companies are, but I think all these revelations are essentially making me rethink what he actually said. No matter… whether we like it or not, the data is out there and somebody will collect it. It is extremely easy for some people to collect it, we just cannot avoid it. So I think he is just basically saying “If you take that as your starting point, then you should think about whether you should be doing things that you do not want other people to know.” It is a different thing from saying it is creepy.

Kaiser first book was Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do.

About Kaiser: He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, in addition to degrees from Princeton and Cambridge Universities. He is Vice President of Business Intelligence and Analytics at Vimeo, a high-quality video hosting platform for creative people. He previously worked at Sirius XM Radio, American Express, [X+1], Exodus Communications, and Sonus Networks. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University teaching practical statistics.

Hi-Octane Innovation for your Brain

Today’s sales people are met with great challenges. They live in a world where we all talk about the importance of relationships, but few have the time to build them. Especially when, organizations are making more and more decisions as committees and the actual decision process, let alone the decision maker, is getting harder and harder to define. Your ability to be extremely focused and intuitive may be the most important assets you possess. Few sales managers or salespeople would disagree with any of the following statements:

Successful Salespeople:

• Focus
• High expectations
• Self-Motivated
• Stay in the Moment
• Intuitive

We view these as very difficult traits to be acquired. We might even say that salespeople are born with them. The truth is few of us know how to acquire them. We read self-help and how-to books, attend training sessions and receive coaching to improve these needed traits. This training  may helps us temporarily, but after time we slip back to where we were before.

Just as we need continuous improvement on the shop floor, we need continuous improvement in the sales arena. We need more than a method. We need a way to exercise and sharpen our mind.  We need to develop the skill of intuition. We need a way to develop and maintain a sales personality. What we need is to program ourselves, our minds to success.

Few of us will argue over the power of meditation. It can prove beneficial by providing us clear thought and more energy. It is a skill that needs to be developed taking many years to master. The benefits are enormous it is just a matter of practice. It comes down to the fact most people will not take the time, and if you are a salesperson, it is not even a consideration. I would like to introduce you to an area that I call, The Sales Neuro Charger or meditation on steroids. It is a combination of Brainwave and Biofield Entrainment. Review this page, How it Works, for more technical information. 

You should be cautious in buying into Biofield and Brainwave Entrainment. Brainwave entrainment has been around since 1960’s. Biofield is relatively new technology and should be approached with caution. I have followed and participated, off and on, with Brainwave entrainment and meditation for over twenty years. My recent return has been a result of being introduced into Biofield Entrainment. I have become associated with the product and feel that it offers some significant advantages for sales people. In fact, it is a great companion to Neuro Linguistic Programming or NLP.

Lean more by visiting this page, Sales Neuro Charger.
It has been called hi-octane innovation for your brain.

Empathy is the Fundamental Principle of Understanding.

From my blog post, Do you only Listen through your Ears?:

Empathy is a major differentiator between the traditional process methodologies of Six Sigma, and I say this tongue–in-cheek, Lean. Many times when you review Design for Six Sigma, Lean Startup, Lean Product Development, and Lean Design (the list goes on), seldom when you search (like never) the index of the book will you find the words Empathy. I think that is a major difference in Design Thinking, Service Design and as I like to call it, EDCA.

That word empathy is a hard thing to practice. Some people may say you are born with or raised with it. I think you can acquire it, but it takes a different set of listening skills than most of us  develop.

In a recent article in the New York Times, The Morality of Meditation, I have taken the liberty of pulling several quotes:

MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing.

This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable) pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation was originally intended.

The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.

Meditation increased the compassionate response threefold.

They confirmed that even relatively brief training in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain areas associated with empathic understanding of others’ distress — areas whose responsiveness is also modulated by a person’s degree of felt associations with others.

If we want to connect with our customer, if we want to develop an intuitive read of his organizations needs, do we not need first to have compassion and empathy. It is the act of empathy that we develop through using the Sales Neuro Charger and/or meditation that allow us to utilize them in the sales process. Empathy is the fundamental principle of understanding. How can we develop objective views without it?