Are you looking at growth strategies from a customer’s viewpoint?

One of my favorite authors, Michael Schrage, author of Serious Play, recently published a new book taking these concepts one step further. Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? challenges us to take our value proposition of use to a longer term growth platform. He dares us not only to have a corporate vision statement but a customer vision statement saying that our future depends on their future. He phrases all this in something he calls “The Ask” and defines it this way:

Conventional management wisdom has evolved from thinking about innovation as designing for customers, to innovation as designing with customers. The Ask takes the next essential leap: thinking about innovation as designing customers. Innovation should be treated as a medium and method for (re)designing customers.

Making customers the (re)design focus fundamentally changes how innovators invest in change. At one global foods giant, The Ask prompted spirited debate about creating a "store within a store" instead of redesigning product packaging and point-of-purchase displays. These executives grasped that the future of a brand or a marketing promotion or a product enhancement demanded different conversations than defining their customers' futures. Designing tomorrow's best customer is not the same as designing tomorrow's best product.

We find our greatest growth opportunities on the edges of the use of our product/services. We must make a concentrated effort to identify and participate in relevant knowledge flows on the edge (EDCA). In the book The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, the authors discuss the relationship between the core and the edge. In the excerpt below, think about the core being the standard work (SDCA) of your growth strategy. PDCA provides the bridge between the core (SDCA) and the edge (EDCA).

Knowledge flows naturally flourishes on the edge. Why? Because by definition, participants on these edges are wrestling with how to match unmet needs with unexploited capabilities and all the uncertainty that implies. Edge participants therefore focus on ways to innovate and create value by connecting unmet needs with unexploited capabilities and then scaling these opportunities as rapidly as possible. In the process, they create significant new knowledge.

Since much of the most relevant knowledge on the edge is tacit knowledge, edge participants naturally place a heavy emphasis on building diverse networks of relationships that will help them to collaborate more effectively with others in the creation of new knowledge. For this reason, gatherings where participants can share stories and experiences, learn from each other, and identify potential collaborators become particularly prominent on the edges.

Edge participants often reach out to participants in the core in an effort to build relationships and enhance knowledge flows. But those efforts are often frustrated or at best to marginalize because where participants are too busy concentrating on defensive strategies within the core, trying to protect their profits and position, to understand the true growth opportunities represented by relevant edges. Or participants tend to focus on transactions rather than investing in a long-term effort to build sustainable, trust-based relationships on the edge.

Keep thinking about the relationship between SDCA, PDCA, EDCA. Lean becomes even more powerful in these terms. More from the Power of Pull:

For this reason, especially, the few core participants to understand the full potential of the edge and are able to reach out and connect into rich knowledgeable flows occurring on the edge will be in the best position to create economic value. They will be able to respond to increasing margin pressure in the core by helping to scale innovation on the edge and in participating rich new sources of profitable growth arising there. Unfortunately most core participants to the extent that they recognize increasing importance of knowledge flows at all, tend to focus and knowledge flows within the core rather than making a concentrated effort to identify and participate in relevant knowledge flows on the edge.

Why do these edge people or these risk takers even care about the core people? Edges and cores need each other. Unless they become part of the core, edge players never gain access to the stature, money or connections that exist in the core. The core needs innovation from the edge to continue refreshing and regenerating itself. In business terms, edge companies need resources to scale growth and core companies need new growth platforms to compensate for increasing competitive pressures.

When we envision tomorrow’s best product or service being used in our customer’s future it creates far-reaching possibilities. Our most successful sales people are already thinking in these terms. Recently, I wrote a blog post, Lean Salespeople are Challengers, not Problem Solvers, about how The Challenger type salespeople are willing to challenge a customer’s thinking to create new opportunities through more effectiveness or innovative ways. It is this type of thinking of your customer’s business, the edges of their business that we must strive to achieve through the methods of SDCA, PDCA and EDCA.

Lean Sales Methods Webinar

During the week of June 3rd, the Business901 blog and Podcast will be dedicated to the latest thoughts on utilizing Lean Sales Methods in organizations. At the end of the week, Friday June 7th, I will host a webinar on Lean Sales Methods followed by an interactive session and a Q and A. Only registered participants will be invited to webinar and Q & A.

Lean Sales Methods allows us to start thinking about adaption and understanding that occur during learning cycles. We no longer can think about control and manipulation that occurs in the traditional sales funnel.  The problem is that sales forces have been forced to create their own hybrid way to accomplish their goals, SALES. As a result, most organization have left the sales people fend for themselves as long as they met their numbers.  We accepted a variety of methods from relationship to problem solving selling deeming that every salesperson has their own style. Though this is true, it often results in misinformation and downstream problems after the job has been sold.

Lean Sales Methods do not organize and streamline the process for a cookie cutter approach. Instead it emphasizes an action framework that allows sales people and teams to evaluate a range of options around pre-constructed scenarios. In simpler terms, we practice the possible outcomes and determine strength based approaches to them. A general outline of the week long activities:

1. Gemba Walks
2. Why every sales call should be constructed around CAP-Do
3. What Metrics should be reported
4. How to improve Sales Dialogue
5. Teaming in the Sales Arena
6. Why Problem Solving is out and Challenging is in.
7. What is in it for the Sales Managers

The webinar will be approximately 15 minutes long. Afterwards, there will be an interactive session on Story Dialoguing your Sales Pitch followed by a Q and A session.

Join us and register for this event. The material will be distributed, through a variety of media, to include Business901 blog, podcast, YouTube channels, Slideshare and the newsletter. At a later day, it will be accumulated and posted to the Training content on the Business901 website. By registering, you will receive this material as it is distributed. We will also furnish updates and lessons learned to the registered participants. Only registered participants will be invited to webinar and Q & A.

About: Joe Dager is president of Business901, a firm specializing in bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and marketing arena. He has taken his process thinking of over thirty years in small business within a wide variety of industries and applied it through Lean Marketing Concepts. Joe put himself through college utilizing the GI Bill, the result of being a member of the 82^nd Airborne Division, and as a welder at Asphalt Drum Mixers. This hands-on approach and an education in both in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering have served him well becoming president of that company and later leaving to own several other companies. Joe has participated in company revitalization efforts, start-ups, and turnarounds, in a variety of industries, to include professional services, retail, and manufacturing.

Lean 3P Design: More Humanistic by Going Back to Nature

In the Lean Design we use a process that is called Lean 3P. One of the most contentious part of 3P is this idea of looking to nature, to try to find solutions to the problems you're trying to solve. We begin by looking at all the value‑adding steps. Then for each of those value‑adding steps, we try to get the group to look at seven different alternatives that can be created to create that process step. They come from nature. This tends to be a very interesting part of the event, where a lot of people really love it. Other people really hate it.

Allan Colletta in a Business901 Podcast said about this process:

This part of the process attempts to expand the thinking beyond the common approaches we use within the industry. So, at a very minimum, I always say, "It's a great icebreaker to get the whole group just working well together and to get everything a little bit out of the box."

At its best, we've seen some really great examples, where this out of the box thinking from nature has pointed us in some alternative directions that we never would have considered otherwise. That's really the goal and that whole process doesn't take more than a couple of hours, normally.

From there, you go into taking those seven natural alternatives and you bring it into the realm of sort of industry‑proven approaches. So if you were rolling something along the thing, what mechanisms do we have for rolling things? Well, you could have a laboratory table. There are all kinds of ways from industry that people have used to do these different things.

You got all these different alternatives. Then once you get seven alternatives for every one of the process steps, then we start narrowing it down. And you're narrowing those down to three viable alternatives that you could actually do. While this is going on, you've got your teams that are pursuing these, investing, and trying to understand how viable these options are. So a lot of research being done, a lot of learning taking place. As you go through it, you converge on three that are very practical and your divide your group up into, typically three groups, and they go off and they build. They're actually, physically, trying to build the prototypes of whatever it is that they've been assigned.

At first, I felt this process of looking to nature was silly. It took some real effort to try it. However, I have found it  to be very eye-opening and challenging. Going back to nature, going back to the source makes it more humanistic, maybe.

Lean 3P Design: Podcast and Transcriptions

Using a One Page Project Manager

I have been a big fan of the The One-Page Project Manager for many years. In fact, the author Clark Campbell reminded me in a phone call that I was the first one to write a review on the first book. Since then, they have added three more books to the collection with the most recent, The New One-Page Project Manager: Communicate and Manage Any Project With A Single Sheet of Paper replacing the first book. In this one, they even tackle Agile Project management that I found extremely useful.

I was finally able to run down Mick Campbell co-founder, co-author and Managing Partner of OPPM International to discuss their latest efforts. Mick brought a rich portfolio of both technical and qualitative experience in traditional and agile project management.

Joe: I think it's (One Page Project Management) better than a reporting thing. I have always used it as a communication tool. I think, it raises questions, allows things to move around, assigns a lot of responsibilities and you can even do some "what ifs" with it if you would like. How has it developed in your mind? It's more than a reporting tool isn't it?

Mick: It really is. In our new book, as we thought on how to get the idea of communication to the market in general, we used the analogy of a watch face. For anyone who flies knows that still dials are well used, despite all the electronics that we can still put into our planes. It is because they communicate so crisply.

So, we used that analogy to say that communication if I take one step back, communication is the great statistical difference maker in, certainly, in project success and we would probably take, even, a step back and say in business and life and other elements. Our ability to communicate well provides for us an opportunity for success.

Recognizing that you have hit the nail on the head identifying that the One-Page Project Manager, albeit, the genesis of a report, facilitates for communication, pushing really, a lot of, what we might call from a Lean perspective, non-value added work out of our communication and making it intuitive.

You look at your watch, you don't do calculations, you just have a general sense if you've got a meeting at 11:30 and you're looking at your watch, and it's 11:00 you know in your gut how long a half an hour is how many different things you might be able to accomplish before that.

We wanted to have the OPPM, the One-Page Project Manager, be just that. A communication tool that, when provided to any individual, they might look at it and have a sense intuitively as to what's going on, what's the status, how are we doing, what areas might we need some more help on, or, at a high level, you were spot on.

t's a tool that facilitates communication. We've had a woman send us her daughter's wedding on an OPPM and maybe a little bit later I can tell the listeners how the effort to put Governor Romney in the White House from a transition team was done on OPPMs as well.

The One Page Project Manager is not meant to replace a full blown project management system. It helps you identify and communicate the essential details of a project. I recommended the book in my book, Marketing with A3 as an effective reporting tool. I have also written before about the The One-Page Project Manager for Execution: Drive Strategy and Solve Problems with a Single Sheet of Paper. I think the OPPM is a great companion to Lean and especially A3s. I utilize the OPPM with A3s slightly different than the book describes. I use the entire back side of the A3 for the OPPM. I take advantage of a little artistic interpretation of what constitutes one page.

Related Blog Post:
Learn the One Page Project Manager at Shingo Prize Conference

P.S. I have certainly stretched the use of OPPM and managed some rather in-depth and lengthy projects with it. In fact one such project I actually reconfigured the Excel sheet to hold over 100 tasks.

CHAT in Activity Theory Thinking

In my mailbox several weeks ago from the website Academia.edu, I came across an article, How Instructional Designers Solve Workplace Problems, co-authored by Dr. Lisa Yamagata-Lynch.  An abstract on the article:

The findings revealed differences between experts and novices with regards to tolerance of ambiguity, expectations about their own roles in finding solutions for their clients, adaptability, attention to appropriate details, and management of workplace stress. The contrast between instructional design processes taught in universities and actual workplace practice was noted by both expert and novice participants. Experienced participants demonstrated adaptability in processes and communications to efficiently arrive at viable solutions for their clients. Expectation setting and relationship building emerged as techniques for creating environments supportive of instructional designers' problem-solving activities.

Dr. Yamagata-Lynch authored the book Activity Systems Analysis Methods: Understanding Complex Learning Environments where she outlines Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). CHAT is one of several theoretical frameworks that are popular among educational researchers because it conceptualizes individuals and their environment as a holistic unit of analysis.  Activity systems analysis is one of the popular methods among CHAT researchers for mapping complex human interactions from qualitative data.

I found the area fascinating and applicability to sales and marketing. I had a great time in the podcast as we explored the world of Design and discussed her present work in Design Thinking and Theory.

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download this episode

or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Mobile Version

What Dr. Lisa Yamagata-Lynch says about herself:

Teaching Interests
In the classroom I encourage students to experience their own construction of understanding regarding the teaching-learning and design processes. I want my students to be aware of their beliefs regarding this process, and to be aware of what influences those beliefs have on their teaching and design practices. I encourage students to become involved in a dialogue with colleagues and mentors regarding their beliefs, and to become reflective practitioners. Through the activities I facilitate, I want students to pose questions that engage them in project-based problem solving activities. I do not want to promote the impression that there is one correct answer for issues related to teaching and design, but I want students to be able to find their own pedagogical solutions.

Research Interests
I identify myself as a Cultural Historical Activity Theorist (CHAT), and I believe that knowledge is not an isolated set of rules accessed only when necessary, but is a shared entity that is distributed among individuals, context, activity, artifacts, and in the interactions that take place among the above. I also believe that individuals belong in a community that enables them to share and negotiate their knowledge with other members. For the last several years I have focused my research in using activity theory, or more specifically activity systems analysis, for understanding the complex nature of human interactions within a community.

Standard Work in Lean Marketing

Leader standard work is a concept in Lean Management, popularized by David Mann in his book “Creating a Lean Culture: Tools to Sustain Lean Conversions, Second Edition”, that creates standard work for managers. For many in the Agile community, the notion of “standard work” brings a repellent idea of standardization and work standards, and the oppressive boot-jack command culture that comes with that. And yet, the way that Toyota implements standard work, it is much more akin to coding standards or working agreements, where you record the current best agreed upon way of the workers in the system for doing something, than an oppressive regime of Quality Checks.

David describes the principle nicely in his presentation on Creating a Lean Culture Process Focus and Leader Standard Work. The purpose of Leader Standard Work is to create behavioral change that drives Lean Leaders to visit the place where work is being done. This, along with Visual Management and a Daily Accountability process helps ensure the technical improvements in the Lean Transformation aren’t lost to the culture of firefighting and backsliding into what he calls the “pit of instability and despair” or what I like to call, “business as usual.” So, there are many organizational benefits to Leader Standard Work. And the good news is, it’s also a great way to drive some sanity into your day as a manager.

Since Lean is so intrinsically tied to standard work, many believe Lean cannot apply to their “Knowledge Based” occupation. In fact, it is often resisted in these circles. When met with resistance, I have found that typically there is a good reason why. As I review most Leader Standard Work for knowledge workers, I still find them heavily laden with specific instructions and very results based focus. In Sales and Marketing (I am considering Sales and Marketing to be knowledge work) , you will see instructions such as make 25 calls, send out 15 e-mails, 3 blog posts a week, etc. On the other hand, I do see slack time allowed under the disguise of daily or weekly Kaizen. So Leader Standard Work can apply to Sales and Marketing 9Knowledge Workers), or can it?

Leader Standard Work will fizzle out quickly if you simply try to practice Leader Standard Work through Lean Training, coupled with your experience and try to become more proficient through iteration after iteration. It doesn’t work that way. In fact, it may take years, certainly months, to acquire the skills needed. What stops you is that you not only have to learn new skills but these skills and learning are not stagnant. They are in constant turmoil; developing, adapting and evolving while obsoleting the existing structure.

Many companies may fall short as a result of not creating the internal collaboration structure needed for learning. The organization must develop as a whole and this can only be accomplished by developing their personnel by providing the necessary resources and opportunities. We also need to promote individual differences. Instead of teaching the way to do some things, we may need to step back and determine the key points that are required, as Simon Sinek says the “Why” while leaving the how alone (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action).

When developing your Leader Standard address these three items;

1. Clarification – Minimum standard is explicit
2. Commitment – Level of commitment is expected from the individual
3. Connection – A path for support through conversation is provided.

Can your Leader Standard Work pass the 3 C Test?

 

Grow your Small Business with Lean

What would Dr. Deming think of the new Lean Math?

When was the last time you had a discussion about designs with more than one blocking variable, such as a Latin Square Design? Or maybe, a midnight discussion on empirical modeling or factorial designs at two levels? Those were the days.

Recent publications, spurred by Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup, are Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience and Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster. They dive into the world of Lean Metrics or so they say. In all fairness, they do an excellent job presenting basic measurements that can be utilized by the modern day entrepreneur. I recommend both books and think they add good insight for the targeted audience.

Recently on the Business901 Podcast, The Wisdom of Brian Joiner, I had the please of interviewing Brian Joiner, a Dr. Deming protégé and a disciple of George Box. George Edward Pelham Box FRS is a statistician, who has worked in the areas of quality control, time-series analysis, design of experiments, and Bayesian inference.  His name is associated with results in statistics such as Box–Jenkins models, Box–Cox transformations, Box–Behnken designs, and others. Box wrote "essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful" in his book on response surface methodology with Norman R. Draper. George also schooled Bill Hunter another fabled statistician and father of John Hunter, a recent podcast guest and writer of the Deming Blog. These people understood metrics.

There seems to be a distance between what many of us may consider Lean Metrics and Lean Startup Metrics. They both have their place, and it does just depend on what you need at the moment. Neither can replace the other. However, a new blog, Lean Math has come to my attention that may provide the bridge between these two areas. The blog is authored by a group of Lean Practitioners to include another former podcast guest, Mark R. Hamel. Mark is a lean implementation consultant, Shingo Award-winning author Kaizen Event Fieldbook, and founder of the Gemba Tales blog.

An introductory video from Lean Math Blog co-founder Mark R. Hamel. The video briefly discusses the launch of LeanMath.com, the co-founders, forthcoming book to be published by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, site topics, and related social media.stages. Even though Dr. Deming preferred, you do not have to be a statistician to utilize Lean Metrics. However, you made need to learn a little Lean Math along the way.

Transcription of Mark’s podcast: Sustaining your Kaizen Event Ebook

Podcast: How to Implement your Kaizen Event Successfully

Would you like this Blog Feed delivered to your inbox?

Purchase the Marketing with Lean Book Series and receiving access to the online Lean Sales and Marketing Training at no additional charge.