Business901 Book Specials from other authors on Amazon

Showing posts with label Agile Marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Agile Marketing. Show all posts

Friday, November 1, 2013

Lean Service Design Slidedeck

At the ASQ 2013 Service Conference, this week, I had the honor of giving a sixty-minute presentation on Lean Service Design. All the participants of my presentation received a CD that contained my Lean Service Design Program. This is the slidedeck from the presentation.

I also introduced CAP-Do (More Info) to the audience. CAP-Do is a systematic way to address the problems (pain) or opportunities (gain) from the use of our products and services.

Purchase the Lean Service Design Program!

Or, purchase the 130 page PDF for download, Lean Service Design

Thursday, November 29, 2012

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.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

The Marriage in Lean Service Design

This may sound like Abraham Maslow’s saying, “If all you have is a hammer; everything looks like a nail” and if it does, I will admit that my principles and practices are with a Lean based approached. Most of the work I have seen to date in Service Design has been educational or Public Sector work. I have seen where private companies have instituted Service Design but many times the cost has been funded from a public entity. I think Service Design and its forerunner; The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing type thinking may be Crossing the Chasm from early adaptors to early majority.

In my use of Service Design, I have had mixed results with most companies very interested in learning more about Service Design but few willing to take the initiative to design and implement Service Design.

It has been very similar to what I have found in Lean Sales and Marketing; interested but to implement? As a result, the best prospects are mature companies well into their Lean Journey and willing to take on a pilot project. Even at that, it is usually initiated by the Lean Champion who wants to introduce the Standard Tools of Lean and improve processes versus using Lean as a vehicle for growth.

The umbrella of Lean offers Service Design a method of entry into a well-established market. Lean has been very successful in Services and Design through traditional practices. However, Lean Design is rooted in tangible applications (excluding software for the moment). The leap of faith that must occur is to move away from these traditions and institute a wider scope of Design to Services. The Design Thinking concepts that are most commonly associated with IDEO seems to provide the clearest and accepted understanding.

Below is a Venn Diagram on how I view the three disciplines of Lean, Service, and Design. I have also included SDCA, PDCA, EDCA as a way to demonstrate the use of Lean in Services and Design. I like to use the term EDCA learned from Graham Hill  to designate the Explore aspect of Lean.  I view it as more of Design Type thinking content that allows for that collaborative learning cycle with a customer. This is a link to my blog post on the tools of SDCA, PDCA, EDCA: http://business901.com/?p=8490.

LSD

We live in a service centric world. Even companies to include most manufacturers are defined not by their products but the services they offer. Can we continue to give away services to sell products? Has production capacity slowed that we now have excess overhead? Maybe, we are a mature Lean Company and have become so efficient in our services that we have excess capacity? Is it time that we design around our services? Is it time to discover, how to develop our services into a profit center?

Shameless Plug: Lean Service Design Workshop  You could also attend a live presentation by joining our SlideCast on Thursday July 12th at 1:00 PM Eastern. It is by invitation only, so drop me an email through the contact page on my website.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Designing your Training

Gamification continues to be a hot subject. Gartner Group predicts Gamification will be a key trend that every CIO, IT planner and Enterprise Architect must be aware of as it relates to business. I think it goes deeper than that. A primer on Gaming with a Mindmap can be found at the Core Concepts of Gamification.

The Business901 podcast in July will center on training to include Simulations, Virtual Games, E-Learning, Gamification and a new area that is just starting to creep into our vocabulary, Transmedia Storytelling. I did not try to dissect and arrive at conclusive evidence. I followed the same approach that I have learned in Service Design; explore the possibilities first.

Does training have to be fun? Does it have to be theatrical? Can your training be a Transmedia Experience? Why not, let’s see what the experts say. 

July Guest

1st Week (July 8th): I feel Service Design principles are the best way to capture, create and implement an outstanding customer experience. But, we all need Business Case for doing this, right? I start out the series with An Economist who practices Service Design, Sylvain Cottong and follow up  with Vincenzo Di Maria, who will be running the Service Design Summer Course the first two weeks of August this year.

2nd Week (July 15th): We start with professor, author and practitioner, Karl Kapp whose latest book is The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. We finish the week with Paul Myerson discussing his Lean Supply Chain & Logistics Simulation.

3rd Week (July 22nd): How do you captivate and engage today’s audiences? It’s simple use multiple platforms says award-winning transmedia writer, game designer and author, Andrea Phillips. If you cannot wait for the podcast her new book, A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling provides a fantastic introduction.  Jamie Flinchbaugh, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Lean hardly needs an introduction on this blog, Jamie and I discuss the role of simulation games with particular attention to the Lean Learning Center’s, The Mouse Trap Experience.

4th Week (July 29th): David Veech of the Institute for Lean Systems joins me to discuss Teamwork and Education Based Lean Transformations. And finally, we discuss Gaming with a professional Gamer, who just returned from DreamHack (world’s largest LAN party) in Jonkoping, Sweden, the world’s largest digital festival.

The new generation learners are growing up with games as part of everyday life. How will this effect training in the future? Are trainers incorporating any “gaming” thoughts in their work? And, what are gamers expecting?  We will discuss these points and many more through the podcast, articles, videos, guest posts, and a few blog posts of my own. At the end, we may even draw some new insights on training. However, lets enjoy the ride for the moment. 

P.S. The latest Touchpoint 4#1 - Eat, Sleep, Play from the Service Design Network has some interesting articles surrounding services that aim to fulfill the basic human needs of eating, sleeping and playing.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Mastering Positive Change

Sara Lewis, the Managing Director of Appreciating Change, a psychological change consultancy focused on helping leaders and managers achieve positive change in their organizations was my podcast guest. She is the author of Positive Psychology at Work: How Positive Leadership and Appreciative Inquiry Create Inspiring Organizations and one of my favorites, Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management: Using AI to Facilitate Organizational Development .

This is an outstanding addition to the series of Business901 podcasts on Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Change. Sarah works closely with the client to ensure partnership and ownership, we bring expertise in psychology and in social change methodologies such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space and World CafĂ©. All of these approaches help reduce resistance to change and the need to create ‘buy-in’, rather people co-create the change of which they will be part. This message resonates throughout the podcast.

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

This year Appreciating Change has begun offering a series of Masterclass workshops to give people the chance to learn directly from Sarah's experience in the field of Positive Psychology and particularly the use of Appreciative Inquiry in the workplace. These run every 3 months and alternate between a Masterclass aimed at fellow practitioners, which is tailored to those who have some experience and understanding of the theory behind organizational change already, and a Masterclass aimed at leaders in organizations which is more aimed at helping them use this learning in their management of the organization.

Related Information:
Getting Resistance to Appreciative Inquiry?
Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving
An Appreciative Look at the World
My Engagement Strategy – Appreciative Inquiry

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

Could this be the missing link between Lean and Sales and Marketing? 

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) focuses on growing or increasing in value through exploration and discovery. It is a positive approach to change. It compliments Lean Thinking when you view Lean from a Value perspective versus a Waste Perspective. It is also relevant on how you use Lean. If you use Lean on the supply side of the equation ridding yourself of waste might be the predominant thought. If you use Lean on the demand side, you have a tendency to view it more as a value producing mechanism.

Lean vs Appreciative Inquiry

  • Lean you identify key problems vs AI you look for best experience or practice.
  • Lean analyzes causes vs AI create future vision.
  • Lean finds possible solutions vs AI shares values through dialogue.
  • Lean you create action plans vs AI creates the future.
  • Lean lends itself to linear understanding vs AI "leans" toward circular understanding.

AI-vs-Lean

So what are your thoughts?

  • What happens when you take a positive approach to Lean?
  • Does the same problem solving methods work?
  • Can Appreciative Inquiry co-exist with Lean?

I was introduced to Appreciative Inquiry by fellow blogger, Ankit Patel who can be found at The Lean Way Consulting.

Related Information:
Slideshow, I used for reference:
Value can no longer be defined as What a Customer will pay for!
Evolution of Standard Work in my Sales and Marketing
Prototypes provide a Pathway for Connecting with Customers

Monday, November 21, 2011

It’s the Who, not the Why

Start with Why is an excellent book which I have highlighted in my blog post, Does your customer know why you do it? with author’s Simon Sinek Ted appearance. It is a great message and his discussion of the Golden Circle really nails his point. However, it is a little internally focused for me and like so many others it attempts to drive your message home from the inside out. Who is the keyword, not Why.

Why is simply yesteryear. When asking Why we focus on solutions for the customer. There are plenty of people that can solve a customer’s problem. Why is a commodity based approach that does not separate you from the competition. Simon does an excellent job using the Golden Circle to demonstrate how you have to have the passion for “Why” and translating that into the How and the What you are doing. He says that you will find like customers that share the same “Why” passion. However, this philosophy still centers on the fact that there are plenty customers out there. It does not consider the fact that for most, there is a short supply of customers.

An example of Why thinking using a simple purchase such as a new refrigerator: we address the concerns of the customer by asking why we need one, how much do they want to spend and what fits in the hole. If we start with the Who; we center on their lifestyle, who is using it, who will be installing it, who will be removing it, and maybe even who will be paying for it (if we don’t have terms to delay payment till next year). We develop a customer experience that is extended into delivery, warranty and service agreements.

We live in a replenishment society, most of us do not need anything else. We have everything. It is the company that takes the time to understand the customer and their behaviors that enables them to not simply design a solution but centering on the Who to create an outstanding customer experience. If we do that, we end up creating products and services that customers can’t resist and competitors can’t copy.

Who…

  1. Externalizes your thought processes
  2. Creates customer centric organization
  3. Enables a spirit of

    • Community
    • Co-operation
    • Co-learning
    • Co-producing
    • Co-creation

Who is the key in developing an obsession to understand the customer and allow us to deliver on customer desires and wants versus just their needs. Average companies deliver on customer needs, above average companies deliver on desires. Which one are you?

Related Information:
Work on demand, ‘It’s the demand side, stupid’
The Death of PDCA
Service Innovation – Rethinking Customer Needs
Why the Lean SALES PDCA Cycle was Created!

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Shalloway on Teamwork in Kanban, part 3 f 3

Alan is an industry thought leader in Lean, Kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum and agile design. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in these areas. He is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives and also can be found on twitter @alshalloway.

Alan is the primary author of
Essential Skills for the Agile Developer: A Guide to Better Programming and Design
Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility
Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design
And a favorite of mine: Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Teamwork in Kanban or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

This podcast is broken down into 3 parts. I had trouble running Alan down and finally caught him on his cell phone so the quality is not the best. However, Alan delivered great content and we could hardly stop talking. His view of the Agile community, Scrum, Kanban and Lean is unique and refreshing.

Part 1 of 3: Alan Shalloway discusses the state of Agile!, part 1 of 3
Part 2 of 3: Can Agile work at the Enterprise Level with Alan Shalloway?

Related Information:
The Lean Agile Train Software Transcription
Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA
Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development
The differences in Lean and Agile

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Hansei in Lean Marketing

Lean Sales and Marketing is built upon the philosophy that there has been a subtle shift to knowledge as the way to engage, develop and retain your customer base. The sales and marketing team must act as a vehicle to cultivate ideas not only within their four walls but more importantly from their customers and markets. If this is true, how do create new knowledge? How do we learn? Most studies show that we learn best by doing and by being forced to resolve our perspective with those of others who disagree with us. This means that you have to encourage contradictions and be willing to push the envelope with your customers.MwPDCA

This is a strange paradox. Disagreement with your customer can hardly be seen as a positive mechanism for sales and marketing. However, it is the embracement of this understanding that will move your sales and marketing efforts to a higher level of performance.

Can you disagree with a customer? Can you purposely cause tension? You must! You must move away from the comfort zone and create a healthy tension and instability in your sales and marketing process.

The next step in the process is surprisingly easy but difficult to do. It is the process of reflection or in Japanese, hansei. There are three key components of hansei:

  1. Recognize that there is a problem – a gap between expectations and achievement – and be open to negative feedback.
  2. Voluntarily take responsibility and feel deep regret.
  3. Commit to a specific course of action to improve.

The first step, acknowledge that there is room for improvement is not that difficult. However, putting a number to it may be a different story. When we create a performance gap we identify 2 things, one where we are at now and where do we want to go. Of course we may not get there overnight but there will be limitations. You have to determine what is realistic to achieve. A simple but effective way of looking at it is, “From what to what by when”.

The second step can simply be stated – don’t look for excuses. Take responsibility, feel a little humility and move forward. Without this, you will never fully release from the past and it may be much more difficult to bring fresh ideas to the table.

This is your action plan to move forward. However, without step 2, you will seldom be passionate about step 3. It will just be another effort and ownership will be limited. Ownership cannot be done without an emotional attachment.

The steps of Respect first, Reflection second will drive the 3rd step of Kaizen or continuous improvement. This is the process and culture of PDCA in your marketing cycle. It is the embodiment of tension, a performance gap to send you off on a new path. This path acts as expanding spiral of co-creation of knowledge with your customer that will be truly valued. THE ABILITY TO SHARE AND CREATE KNOWLEDGE WITH YOUR CUSTOMER is the strongest marketing tool possible.

Few companies will take this path. Few companies will take the time to develop the level of respect required. Even fewer will use hansei and look at performance gaps releasing their own pre-determined reasons. Few will ever practice continuous improvement in sales and marketing.

Will you?

Friday, August 26, 2011

Mindmap on Death by Meeting–the 4 Meetings

This is a five part afternoon series depicting the mindmaps that I have created on the books of Patrick Lencioni. His website and company, The Table Group offers additional information on these subjects.

This Mindmap was constructed during the listening of the book, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business (J-B Lencioni Series) where the author discusses how meetings should be interactive, not passive, and they should be structured with issues of immediate importance discussed in "weekly tactical" meetings, and issues that will fundamentally affect the business addressed in "monthly strategic" meetings.

The Four Meetings

Related Information:
Becoming Agile: …in an imperfect world
Improve Communication – Have more meetings?
Quality and Collaboration eBook
The 4 Disciplines of Execution (Revised Edition): The Secret to Getting Things Done, On Time, With Excellence

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Lean Sales and Marketing Team Roles

In a previous post, Identifying your Lean sales and marketing teams, I discussed how to choose the objectives and the team structure to match it. After that, you need to identify the team member roles with I describe below. This is part of the SALES PDCA framework that we use before starting the PDCA IMPROVEMENT LOOP. Sales Team Roles

One of the biggest obstacles to effective performance of a sales and marketing team is the lack of a clear vision of responsibilities within the team. Understanding how the team operates helps clarifies the individual team member roles to each other and more importantly externally and specifically to management. I relied heavily on the book Rapid Development as a guideline for the description of the different team models below and highly recommend the book for the depth of knowledge that it contains. This is not meant to be an all-encompassing list nor does it mean that you should utilize more than one team model. It should only be used to help identify your team model for yourself and others.

Business Team: The most common team structure is where there is one lead person and all other team members have equal status. They are differentiated by the technical, customer relationships and social abilities. The team leader is the link to management and often responsible for making final decisions on unresolved issues. The business team structure looks like a typical hierarchi­cal structure. It is adaptable enough that it can work on all kinds of projects-problem resolution, creativity and tactical execution, but its generality is also its weakness, and in many cases a different structure can work better.

Sales Team: The Sales team takes advantage of the relationship that the salesperson has with the customer. In this concept, the salesperson is simply the superstar, much like the surgeon on a surgical-team. This person due to his intimate knowledge of the customer is ultimately responsible for virtually all of the decisions on a project. With the salesperson handling the bulk of the customer interaction, other team mem­bers are free to specialize but only in a supportive role. This structure can work quite well in the short term if from a tactical sense you need to get a project done fast or from a creative sense where a certain idea has been mandated.

Skunk-works Team: A skunkworks team takes a group of talented, creative people, puts them in an area where they will be freed of the organization's normal bureaucratic restrictions, and turns them loose to develop and innovate. These teams are most appropriate for exploratory projects on which creativity is all-important. Skunkworks teams are rarely the most rapid struc­ture when you need to solve a narrowly defined problem or when you need to execute a well-understood plan.

Feature Team: In the feature-team approach marketing people report to marketing managers, developer report to development manager, and so on. Layered on top of this traditional organization are teams that draw one or more members from each of these groups and that are given responsibility for a chunk of the sales cycle functionality. The team becomes accountable. They have access to all the people they need to make good decisions. Feature teams are appropriate for problem-resolution projects because they have empowerment and accountability needed to resolve issues expe­diently. They are also good for creativity projects because interdiscipli­nary team composition can stimulate ideas. The additional overhead incurred with feature teams will be wasted on tactical-execution projects-if all me tasks are clearly-defined, feature teams have little to contribute.

Search-and-Rescue Team: In the search-and-rescue team model, the team acts like a group of emergency medical technicians who go looking for missing mountain climb­ers. The search-and-rescue team focuses on solving a specific problem. It is most appropriate for teams that need to focus on problem resolution. It is too bottom-line orientated to support much creativity and too short-term oriented to support tactical execution.

SWAT Team: The SWAT team model is based on military or police SWAT teams, in which "SWAT" stands for "special weapon and tactics." The idea behind a SWAT team is to take a group of people who are highly skilled with a par­ticular tool or practice and turn them loose on a problem that is well suited to being solved by that tool or practice. SWAT teams are especially appropriate on tactical-execution projects. Their job is not to be creative but to implement a solution within the limits of a tool or a practice that they know well. SWAT teams can also work well on problem-resolution projects.

Professional Athletic Team: The athletes are the stars of the baseball team, and the salespeople are the stars of this team. The team leader and support staff’s role is to clear roadblocks and enable the salespeople to work efficiently. This specific model applies best to tactical-execution projects, which empha­size the highly specialized roles that individual players play. You can apply the model's general idea that management plays a supporting role to devel­opment to all kinds of projects.

Theater Team: The theater team is characterized by strong direction and a lot of negotia­tion about team roles. The central role on the project is occupied by the director, who maintains the vision of the team and signs people responsibility for individual areas. Individual contributors can shape their roles, their parts of the project, as their own artistic instincts move them. But they can't take their ideas so far that they clash with the director' vision. The theater model is particularly appropriate for teams that are dominated by strong personalities. If a role is important enough, and a particular level that the only one who can play it, the director might decide that he or she is willing to put up with the prima-donna for the sake of the project. But if the rest of the cast is strong, the director might pass up a prima donna in order to have a smoother project.

Summary: Regardless of how the teams are organized, I think it is critical that there be a single person who is ultimately responsible for the product's concep­tual integrity. That person can be cast as the architect, surgeon, director, or even sometimes the program manager, but there must be a person whose job it is to be sure that all the teams' good local solutions add up to a good global solution.

Did I leave a team out?

Related Information:
Identifying your Lean sales and marketing teams
What will your workplace be like in 2020?
What’s behind Collaboration and Value Networks?
SALES PDCA Framework for Lean Sales and Marketing

Friday, June 10, 2011

Building a Sales and Marketing Team

This is a well documented video that I just was recently posted on the Agile Advice website. It can serve as a refresher or as a starting point on how you should assemble a Lean Sales and Marketing Team.

The process that IDEO goes through to innovate a new shopping cart: 

Could this mantra work on your team:

  • One conversation at a time
  • Stay focused on topic
  • Encourage wild ideas
  • Defer judgment
  • Build on the ideas of others

Great statement that resonates the main reason you should consider developing a sales and marketing team versus continuing in a silo style structure:

Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius!

Other Takeaways from the video:

  • Each team is assigned a need area
  • Time constraints.
  • Mock-ups or pilots
  • Fail often to succeed sooner!

Related Information:
Pair Problem Solving in the Workplace
There is no Team in Kaizen
Improve Communication – Have more meetings?
Quality and Collaboration eBook

Thursday, March 17, 2011

PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation

Professor Ikujiro Nonaka in the book, The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation proposed that organizational knowledge is created through a cycle of continuous social interaction of tacit and explicit knowledge involving four modes of knowledge conversion: Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization. The cycle is a spiral one as each pass builds upon the other suggesting that each cycle builds on the previous one therefore accumulating knowledge. He depicts this in the SECI Model shown below. SECI Model

Explicit Knowledge can be captured in records of the past such as libraries, archives and databases and is assessed on a sequential basis. It can be expressed in words and numbers and shared in the form of data, scientific formulate, specifications, manuals and the like. This kind of knowledge can be readily transmitted between individuals formally and systematically.

Tacit Knowledge is highly personal and hard to formalize, making it difficult to communicate of share with others. Subjective insights, intuitions and hunches fall into this category of knowledge. It is deeply rooted in and individuals’ actions and experience as well as in the ideals, values, or emotions.

Socialization: This mode enables the conversion of tacit knowledge through interaction between individuals. The key to acquiring tacit knowledge is experience. Without some form of shared experience, it will be extremely difficult for people to share each other’s thinking process. The tacit knowledge is exchanged through joint activities rather than through written or verbal instructions. In practice, socialization involves capturing knowledge through physical proximity. The process of acquiring knowledge is largely supported through direct interaction with people.

Externalization requires the expression of tacit knowledge and its translation into comprehensible forms that can be understood by others. In philosophical terms, the individual transcends the inner and outer boundaries of the self. During the externalization stage individual commits to the group and thus becomes one with the group. The sum of the individuals' intentions and ideas fuse and become integrated with the group's mental world. In practice, externalization is supported by two key factors.

  1. Articulation of tacit knowledge—that is, the conversion of tacit into explicit knowledge –involves techniques that help to express one’s ideas’ or images as words, concepts, figurative language (such as metaphors, analogies or narratives) and visuals. Dialogues, "listening and contributing to the benefit of all participants," strongly support externalization.
  2. Translating the tacit knowledge of people into readily understandable forms. This may require deductive/inductive reasoning or creative inference (abduction).

Combination involves the conversion of explicit knowledge into more complex sets of explicit knowledge. In the combination process,justification (the basis for agreement) takes place and allows the organization to take practical concrete steps.

In practice, the combination phase relies on three processes.

  1. Collecting externalized knowledge from inside or outside the company and the combining such data.
  2. Transferring this form of knowledge directly by using presentations or meeting.
  3. Editing or processing of explicit knowledge makes it more usable (e.g. documents such as plans, report, market data).

Knowledge conversion involves the process of social processes to combine different bodies of explicit knowledge held by individuals. The reconfiguring of existing information through the sorting, adding, re-categorizing and re-contextualizing of explicit knowledge can lead to new knowledge. This process of creating explicit knowledge from explicit knowledge is referred to as combination.

Internalization is the conversion of explicit knowledge into the organization's tacit knowledge. This requires the individual to identify the knowledge relevant for one’s self within the organizational knowledge. That again requires finding one’s self in a larger entity. Learning by doing, training and exercises allow the individual to access the knowledge realm of the group and the entire organization. In practice, internalization relies on two dimensions:

  • Explicit knowledge has to be embodied in action and practice. Thus, the process of internalizing explicit knowledge actualizes concepts or methods about strategy, tactics, innovation or improvement. For example, training programs in larger organizations help the trainees to understand the organization and themselves in the whole.
  • Embodying the explicit knowledge by using simulations or experiments to trigger learning by doing processes. New concepts or methods can thus be learned in virtual situation.

The information above is paraphrased from the Cyberart Database and from Professor Nanaka’s book, The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation

SECI-Model-2When you consider continuous improvement for Sales and Marketing many people relate PDCA to the typical manufacturing analogies such as cycle time and waste reduction. The SECI Model, I have found to be useful in transferring the knowledge-creation activities or thoughts to PDCA. Overlaying the PDCA cycle on the SECI Model correlates to what must occur when viewing PDCA as a knowledge creating methodology. I think it adds a much better focus on the problem solving cycle and how it relates to the transfer of knowledge needed. It further defines the types of human interactions required during each part of the cycle.

The importance of this characterization is to move away from the old model of seeing value from a perspective of goods and services to the new model where value is created or even co-created from experiences. We can no longer market to the memory of our customer but must market and become part of their activities.

The framework of the SECI Model is one of a continuous growing spiral increasing in knowledge. When applied to Marketing with PDCA, it can be viewed as a funnel creating a stronger and stronger knowledge of both customer and supplier. This knowledge is not only about benefits and features but values and beliefs. This is about an ever increasing spiral of compatibility.

Related Posts:
Lean Marketing Creates Knowledge for the Customer
Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing …
The Pull in Lean Marketing
The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota
The Marketing Knowledge Spiral

Friday, March 11, 2011

Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA

I had the pleasure interviewing James O. Coplein, author of the Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development for an upcoming Business901 podcast. I seem to learn so much from the software community and had picked up Jim’s book to help provide a framework for parts of the Lean Marketing House (Marketing with Lean). I was so impressed with the book that I contacted him for a podcast.  An excerpt from the book:

A good feedback cycle has the appearance of causing problems. It will cause emergent and latent requirements to surface. That means rework: the value of prototypes is that they push this rework back into analysis, where it has more value. And most important, good end user engagement changes end user expectations. It is only by participating in a feedback loop that’s grounded in reality that customers get the opportunity they need to reflect on what they’re asking for. If your customer changes their expectations in the process, you’ve both learned something. Embracing change doesn’t just mean reacting to it: it means providing the catalysts that accelerate it.

Explanations like this proliferate throughout the book. and he builds a complete framework for building a Lean Culture without ever calling it that. In the podcast, we talked about the evolution and interpretation of Lean and/or Toyota Production System (TPS) and their relationship with Scrum. It is interesting how they complement each other. In one sense, it is interesting how Scrum is hardly more than a PDCA cycle. But on the other hand it really enhances the PDCA cycle in the spirit of teamwork and flow.

In this video, the Father of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland, CEO of Scrum, Inc and Senior Advisor to OpenView Venture Partners discusses the evolution of Scrum. Jeff discusses the roles, the meetings and the reporting process associated with Scrum methodology.

This video provides an understanding of Scrum and provides a basis for how a team can operate in an iterative fashion. I was always taught in project management to always look at what was left to do more than what was completed. This is a basic theory of the burn-down chart. 

Related Information:
Jeff Sutherland’s Website: http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/
James Coplein;s Website: Gertrude and Cope

Related Posts
Should you Manage your Organization with Agile Techniques?
The differences in Lean and Agile
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
Pull:
The Pull in Lean Marketing
Value Stream Marketing and the Indirect Marketing Concept

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Does your Value Proposition speak of the Customer Experience?

When most organizations think about their value proposition, they think about the tangible benefits that the organization offers or how much better they are in a certain area versus the competition. It might even include their history, technical expertise, latest technology, commitment to customers, etc. Business SWOT Analysis

In the book, Strategy from the Outside In: Profiting from Customer Value the authors describe their variation of a value proposition:

We prefer a third variant that we see in use among customer value leaders. A customer value leader bases its value proposition on a resonating theme – a few elements where the firm is distinctly better than the competition that really to a target market. An effective value proposition offers superior performance, price or relational value and communicates that value in a way that shows that it has a deep appreciation of the customer’s value priorities. The choice of value proposition is also the choice of target customer segment – and vice versa

This variation though more customer centric stops short of describing the experience the customer will have with the company. One of the interesting things about Agile Project Management is that you start with creating a user story. Work is expressed in the backlog as user stories. A team may write its user stories in a number of ways as long as they are written from the perspective of the end user. Put another way, team members are encouraged to think of their work from the perspective of who will use it, hence “user” story.

In building a value proposition, how many times do you start with a customer/prospect telling you how they use or will use the product or service? I know we interview people or perform won/loss analysis, but I wanted to go an additional step. What if we would paint the picture of how a user experiences your product or service? If we would take the time to determine that reaction, would we not create a better value proposition?

I think it might be interesting to define your entire business and your target business through customer experiences. Actually, cataloging the various experiences a customer will have with an organization is a needed exercise to enhance the value of the total experience for its customers.

Interesting Side Note: Joseph B. Pine II and James H. Gilmore, in their book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage, put forth a interesting statement that creates an interesting value proposition on how a customer may interpret your organization by how you charge for your product or service:

  • If you charge for Stuff, then you are in the commodity business.
  • If you charge for tangible things, then you are in the goods business.
  • If you charge for the activities you execute, then you are in the service business.
  • If you charge for the time customers spend with you, then you are in the experience business.
  • If you charge for the demonstrated outcome the customer achieves, then and only then are you in the transformation business

Related Posts:
Agile Marketing – Maybe?
Start your Marketing with a User Story
Digging deeper with User Stories
Using Stories to explain your Marketing Efforts
User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development
evaluate your Customer Needs
Receiving Better Response Rates thru Agile

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Adding Customer Value in Development at Xerox

This Business901 Podcast featured Patrick Waara talking about Xerox’s use of Agile techniques. Pat has been with Xerox for nearly 25 years teaching Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile techniques to Xerox's software development community improving out software development capability. Our conversation originally was designed to discuss swarming and Lean problem solving. However we ventured off into the subject of how Lean, Six Sigma and Agile all work under the same umbrella. If you are regular listener or reader of this blog, you will see the humor in his answer: “It’s all about the Value Flow for the Customer.” Patrick Waara web

Our conversations started based on this recent news release from Xerox:

2010 swarming in action:

Recently, Xerox leveraged the Agile Scrum process – a light-weight project management system – during the development of the WorkCentre® 7545 and WorkCentre 7556, which were announced today (release below). By hosting live, frequent discussions on progress and priorities, the WorkCentre team was able to:

  • Identify and obtain all resources necessary to launch the product on time.
  • Balance the workload of team members who were juggling other projects.
  • Enable problem solving success in a team of people who had never worked together before.

    Whether you call it swarming or Agile, real-time collaboration may become more sophisticated by 2020, but it’s already happening today and building competitive advantages for companies that can harness its power. I’d be happy to arrange a briefing for you with a Xerox Lean Six Sigma executive to discuss how through Agile methods companies can benefit from the “swarming” technique of problem solving. Please let me know if you’re interested.

Pat has both a BS and an MS in computer science from Michigan Technological University.  He has held a variety of jobs at Xerox including developing user interface systems for Xerox's DocuTech and Systems Architect for Xerox's iGen3, all dealing with software development and systems.  

Related Posts:
Kanban at Xerox Corporation
Need a primer on Lean Six Sigma?
Xerox Operational Excellence Program
Xerox drives Agile Processes thru Lean Six Sigma
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Applying the OODA Loop to Lean

Dr. Terry Barnhart, the Senior Director Strategy and Continuous Improvement at Pfizer Global R&D discusses the OODA Loop in this Business901 Podcast. We expand this theory into some practical applications and using the OODA Loop in and outside of rapid deployment. Dr. Barnhart has an upcoming book due out at the end of the year on using Lean in Product Development. It will be published by Productivity Press.Terry Barnhart

For more information on the OODA Loop there is a a Boyd symposium coming up on October 15 and 16 at the Marine base at Quantico, VA. You may contact Stanton Coerr Stanton.coerr@usmc.mil. Dr. Barnhart will also  presenting a short course for Management Round Table on Lean in R&D, which will include a lot of Boyd theory, including the OODA loop and beyond, in Cambridge MA on November 3&4. Go to www.roundtable.com. The promo code FOT (friends of Terry) will give you $300 off.

This is a podcast you do not want to miss. At the end of the podcast the music starts and stops again to include an extra 10 minutes on the discussion of implementing a Lean Culture utilizing OODA Loop principles. A takeaway from our conversation:

If you can find the cultural levers that are aligned with Lean that absorb ideas into your company, you won't need to go force anything. It'll pull it in whether you want it too or not. You won't even be able to stop it.

That's the kind of thing that we've been thinking about. How can we do this with people? How can we do this with divisions? How can we do this with entire companies? It's fascinating because I think there are ways consistent with what Boyd taught. It's not the same but, I think there are ways that companies can boot‑strap the stuff. I don't mean to say it's a grass‑roots or bottom‑up, it's a whatever it is that gets into their cultural system. It'll absorb it very quickly and spread. How can we do that with Lean?

Recommended Reading:
Frans Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Strategy and History),
Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

Related Information:
Phooey on the need for Management Support in a Lean Transformation
The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot Revisited
Key Marketing Concepts from the Korean War
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts!
Boyd’s Law of Iteration: Speed beats Quality :
Iterative Process Gaining Steam – Proof it works :

Monday, November 29, 2010

World of Work Will be Witnessing 10 Changes

 
Gartner Says the World of Work Will Witness 10 Changes During the Next 10 Years

 The world of today is dramatically different from 20 years ago and with the lines between work and non-work already badly frayed, Gartner, Inc.  predicts that the nature of work will witness 10 key changes through 2020. Organizations will need to plan for increasingly chaotic environments that are out of their direct control, and adaptation must involve adjusting to all 10 of the trends. SONY DSC

“Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, 'swarming' and more,” said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow. By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 percent in 2010. “People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,” he added. “In addition, simulation, visualization and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”

  1. De-routinization of Work
  2. Work Swarms
  3. Weak Links
  4. Working With the Collective
  5. Work Sketch-Ups
  6. Spontaneous Work
  7. Simulation and Experimentation
  8. Pattern Sensitivity
  9. Hyper connected
  10. My Place

I think Austin makes some excellent points in the article and I encourage you to read it in its entirety. When, I sit back an observe this structure it is very similar to many of the agile practices that have been developed in the Lean Software Development field. Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Though these practices were a result of improvement in a knowledge based field that are starting to be applied in other areas such as Marketing, Supply Chain and even Hardware Development. One of the difficulties people have in grasping this concept is that it is more about flow and speed of the overall process versus efficiencies. 

The article is a definite read and raises some interesting concepts for all of us to consider.

Related Posts:
Value Stream Mapping your Sales Team
Is your Value Stream Mapping backwards?
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
The Pull in Lean Marketing
Value Stream Marketing and the Indirect Marketing Concept

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Phooey on the need for Management Support in a Lean Transformation

Do you really expect a CEO to lead a Lean Transformation? Why should you even expect upper management to sign off on the transformation before you prove the value of it? Time and time again, I have always heard the failure of any transformation, Lean, Six Sigma or practically any methodology to be the fault of lack of upper management support. Here is why you don’t need them or want them around.

When inducing change in an organization the transformation needs to start along the edges. The core where your upper management exists has a tendency to reward proven solutions; they are not the risk takers. They buy patents, give rewards for innovation and even buy companies. Most core participants tend to focus on knowledge flows within the core rather than making a concentrated effort to identify and participate in relevant knowledge flows on the edge.

In the book The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, the authors’ state:

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.

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.

In tomorrow’s podcast, Terry Barnhart and I discussed how Boyd’s OODA Loop could be used to implement Lean without the efforts of top management or a mandate driven down the chain. It could be driven by performance from the edge. The idea came up during the discussion on isolation and how Boyd saw isolation as a critical strategic device. In effect, the opposite of the information-rich environment that you picture in developing Lean, isolation could be a key factor in a Lean Transformation.

Isolating your enemy, Boyd saw, as a powerful tool in making his OODA loop inoperable, cutting off the flow of information both in and out of the organization. In his 14-hour briefing, "A Discourse on Winning and Losing," Boyd described three strategies for isolation.

"Physically we can isolate our adversaries by severing their communications with [the] outside world as well as by severing their internal communications to one another. We can accomplish [the former] ... via diplomatic, psychological, and other efforts. To cut them off from one another, we should penetrate their system by being unpredictable.

"Mentally we can isolate our adversaries by presenting them with ambiguous, deceptive, or novel situations, as well as by operating at a tempo or rhythm they can neither make out nor keep up with. Operating inside their OODA loops will accomplish just this by disorienting or twisting their mental images so that they can neither appreciate nor cope with what's really going on.

"Morally our adversaries isolate themselves when they visibly improve their well-being to the detriment of others ... by violating codes of conduct or behavior patterns that they profess to uphold or others expect them to uphold."

Building a collaborative team effort will be much easy out on the edge. You will be able to develop and modify your lean practices with ready participants that are looking for similar solutions. Look for early success on the edge, they are much more forgiving and helpful building your team there. As you start moving to the core expect to encounter resistance. Sidestep the resistance, why waste your time? As you build constituency, integrate your culture downstream and the non-believers will isolate themselves from the team.

This sounded at first a pretty cold-hearted method but the truth of the matter is that building a winning team normally includes leaving a few naysayers behind. Many of them will join the team after it has become successful others may never join. This may be a slightly worn out video as it has appeared on my blog before but it is very fitting!

Related Posts:
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
Pull: The Pull in Lean Marketing
Can you be talented enough on your own?

Friday, November 12, 2010

How do you Profit from Customer Value

I had the pleasure this past week of interviewing the co-author of the book Strategy from the Outside In, Christine Moorman for an upcoming Business901 Podcast. Christine is the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor and founder of The CMO Survey at The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.

She stated that many strategies such has shareholder value, core competence, six sigma and right sizing  have lured many companies into a dangerous internal focus, viewing the world from the inside out. As a result, companies lose sight of the market, which leads to poor results over the long run. Inside-out thinking distracts companies from the core purpose of a business: to create and serve customers.

In research for the podcast, I came across this video by the other co-author George S. Day. George is the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor and co-Director of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In this video he emphasized that we must stop looking at your customer as another competitive force but rather embracing how they perceive your relative market position. Understanding this as your market orientation will allow you to achieve greater revenue and profit. He also claims that this orientation with allow you to react sooner sooner to market shifts.

  

The four imperatives that are discussed in the video:

  1. Be a customer value leader
  2. Innovate new value for customers
  3. Capitalize on the customer as an asset
  4. Capitalize on the brand as an asset

If you have been reading my blog for any period of time, you realize George is preaching to the choir here. Great delivery and a real enforcer of why Customer Value is so important.

From the Driving Market Share Website: Every customer is looking for value, and practically every company claims to offer it. Yours is likely no exception. But do you really know what value means to your customers? If you suspected they were less than thrilled with your products and services, how would you go about discovering why? And if you discovered that you were missing a piece or two of the value equation, what would you do to address the problem? These are questions that every business leader should consider, especially in today’s economy. When you make an effort to figure out what value looks like to your customer—and take steps to provide it—the results can be extraordinary.very.

And remember, Customer Value is the best Leading Indicator of Growing Market Share.

Related Posts:
Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
The Pull in Lean Marketing
Value Stream Marketing and the Indirect Marketing Concept