Marketing with A3 Book Release

Sales and Marketing not only needs to improve but must improve their problem solving skills. The book, Marketing with A3 is the introduction needed. It enables sales and marketing to use the Lean tool of A3 as a template or structured approach for their strategies and tactics. It will also demonstrate meaningful and measurable results of their activities. You will enter meetings armed with facts and profound knowledge of sales and marketing efforts. As a result, you will engage in more meaningful conversations. It will require a different approach. The dialogue is sometimes not easy. But seldom is any improvement.

Using a structured approach, such as the Lean thinking tool of A3, the mind remains open, enabling one to examine each element of the decision or problem separately or systematically, and sufficiently, ensuring that all alternatives are considered. The outcome is almost always more comprehensive and more effective than the instinctive approach.

Visit the Marketing with A3 Website

Sample A3s

A3 Podcasts

A3 Community

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Amazon Links

A3 for Special Causes – Lean for Haiti

January 12, 2010 marked the one year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti. A fellow Lean Blogger, Mark Graban of http://leanblog.org was fortunate to meet a special person - Russell Maroni, an x-ray tech at Akron Children's Hospital. He volunteered in Haiti for 15 days in February 2010 as part of the earthquake relief efforts. He was unexpectedly, and necessarily, pressed into service in a medical role, not only caring for patients, but also using his formal lean training from ACH to help improve processes and radiology patient throughput at a field hospital. This is a copy of Russell’s A3 Report, click on the picture to view a pdf of the full size A3.

Mark said in a letter to me last week: 

Russell wrote a very compelling, and very personal, journal during his time in Haiti. He and his colleagues took many pictures. They are sharing this all in a PDF eBook that they are freely distributing - to share the story and to create awareness for Haiti relief needs. They are asking people who read the book to consider donating to the Friends of the Orphans, which runs an orphanage in Haiti.

The journal isn't mainly a "lean story," although it does include his hand-drawn A3 plan. It's a very personal story, of his own prayer and contemplation of the trip, and his experiences in the midst of that tragedy.

I hope you will consider spreading the word about this project to your readers and/or listeners - on blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, radio, etc. Please feel free to forward this email to others you think might help.

To read more, go to http://www.LeanForHaiti.org, which has links to the PDF and our social media sites. If you have ideas for helping promote this, to hopefully make it "viral" in the Lean community, please let me know. We can kaizen the site and the book itself if you have suggestions, if there are defects, or if anything is unclear (especially on the website - a work in progress).

If you can help support this online, please share a link to any blog posts, etc. and I'll list you and your site on the "Supporters of This Project" page on our site. If you have any questions, please let me know. This is purely a volunteer effort on Russell's part and mine. We need all of the free marketing help we can get for this very good cause.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

Mark

Related information: www.leanforhaiti.org

Lean Marketers should read Radical Management

Steve Denning has written an excellent book and portrayed using Lean and Agile techniques to the practice of management. Many of his thoughts parallel mine though I am only viewing these techniques from a sales and marketing perspective. His seven principles depicted below make perfect sense to me. The book is well written, researched and referenced. However, I am not sure the traditional agile people will find anything in the book new or earth shattering though they may see how well they have developed agile into a true management philosophy.

Radical management is a way of organizing and managing work that leads to high productivity, deep job satisfaction, continuous innovation and client delight. It is discussed in Steve Denning's new book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century, published by Jossey-Bass in October 2010.

What are the seven principles of radical management? The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management describes seven basic principles of continuous innovation, along with more than seventy supporting practices. Radical management is a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter-locking principles.

1. The goal of work is to delight clients. Radical management aims at delighting clients and focuses, not just the marketing department, but the entire organization on this goal.
2. Work is conducted in self-organizing teams. Self-organizing teams draw on the full talents and inspiration of the people doing the work.
3. Teams operate in client-driven iterations. Client-driven iterations are key, because delighting clients can only be approached through successive approximations.
4. Each iteration delivers value to clients. Client-driven iterations focus on delivering value to clients by the end of each iteration. This forces closure and enables frequent client feedback.
5. Managers foster radical transparency. Self-organizing teams—working in an iterative fashion—in turn both enable and require radical transparency.
6. Managers nurture continuous self-improvement. Continuous improvement means having the entire work force find better ways to give value to clients.
7. Managers communicating interactively, through stories, questions and conversations. An underlying requirement of all of these principles is interactive communication. Unless managers and workers are communicating interactively, using authentic narratives, open-ended questions and deep listening, rather than treating people as things to be manipulated, none of the above works.

P.S. What do think of this Hitchcock movie?

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