Business901 Book Specials from other authors on Amazon

Monday, July 30, 2012

Instructor Comments on Teaching Service Design

#ServiceDesign Teacher and Practitioner, Vincenzo Di Maria work focuses on socially responsive design and innovation ranging from products to services and experiences. He trained as a designer at Central St. Martin’s College of Art Design in London, where he’ll be running the Service Design Summer Course the first two weeks of August this year.

The podcast centered on Vincenzo teaching and the learning experience of the Summer Design Course and I believe you will find his methods truly unique. I thought that 2-weeks was an awful long time for business people to dedicate to a learning experience. This course, may well be worth it.

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

Mobile Version of Business901 Podcast

Vincenzo Di Maria is and co-founder of Common Ground, a service design firm working across Europe. Their work focuses on socially responsive design and innovation ranging from products to services and experiences. The Common Ground approach to design is holistic, playful and people-centred.

An excerpt from the podcast,  The Two Worlds of Service Design.

Related Information:
Lean Service Design Workshop
Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

Friday, July 27, 2012

Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

Business901 will introduce Lean Service Design Concepts in a rather unique way. Five times a week, Monday through Friday, you will be sent a link to view a video, a presentation, interactive lessons, workbook sheets, or a pre-recorded webinar. The worksheets are at the heart of the workshop and will give you the opportunity to construct a Lean Service Design Experience.

Sign up Now for Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

Lean Service Design changes the way you think about business.  No longer can companies focus their efforts on process improvements. Instead, they must engage the customer in use of their product/service rather than analyzing tasks for improvement. We no longer build and hope that there is a demand. We must create demand through our product/service and Lean Service Design is the enabler of this process. It changes our mindset of thinking about design at the end of the supply chain to make it look good and add a few appealing features (all within budget). Instead, it moves design and the user themselves to co-create or co-produce the desired experience to the beginning of the supply chain.

LSD

Program Outline:

Week 1: The 5 Lean Principles are discussed not in your typical Lean point of view of reducing waste. We view this as knowledge building exercise with continuous improvement through iterative cycles of learning.

Week 2: Services are discussed in the concepts of gaps and how to recognize, measure and improve them as part of everyday work.

Week 3: How do you innovative within the confines of every day work? Design Thinking concepts are introduced and blended with the other components.

Week 4: Team Engagement and empowering people to put these concepts into practice. You’re the teacher now. How can you engage, implement and spread these ideas? 

Time is spent on application and ways to apply Lean tools in a new context. We will not be attempting to teach you individual tools rather expose you to the use of tools through SDCA, PDCA, and EDCA and give you resources to dig deeper into a tool if needed. We encourage membership in the Lean Marketing Lab to expose you to additional sources of information. 

Sign up Now for Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

Program starts on the following Monday after sign-up. If you sign up on weekend, program will start Monday of the following week (7 days later). The workshop price is $149. Training is immediately applicable to your business.

Related Information: 90 Day Program: Lean Service Design Workshop

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Engaging the Front-Line with Kaizen

Joe Swartz and Mark Graban co-authors of Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements were my guests on the Business901podcast, Engaging Front-Line Staff with Kaizen. Below is a transcription of the podcast.

From the Book Description: Healthcare Kaizen focuses on the principles and methods of daily continuous improvement, or Kaizen, for healthcare professionals and organizations. Kaizen is a Japanese word that means "change for the better," as popularized by Masaaki Imai in his 1986 book Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success and through the books of Norman Bodek, both of whom contributed introductory material for this book.

Joseph E. Swartz has been leading continuous improvement efforts for 18 years, including 7 years in healthcare, and has led more than 200 Lean and Six Sigma improvement projects. He is currently the Director of Business Transformation for Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis, IN.

Mark Graban is the author of Lean Hospitals and has worked as a consultant and coach to healthcare organizations throughout the world. He serves as a faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute and is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus, a startup software company that helps healthcare organizations manage continuous improvement efforts. Mark writes the immensely popular Lean Blog, which has not only a focus on Healthcare but touches upon all things Lean.

Related Information:
PDCA from the Outside-in
Transforming Healthcare with Lean eBook
Story of Going Lean in Healthcare: On the Mend
Mark Graban of the Lean Blog discusses Lean Healthcare

At the Crossroads of Economics, Society, Culture & Technology is…

#ServiceDesign Specialist @sly or more formally Sylvain Cottong has worked extensively at these crossroads and as an early Internet evangelist, he has been advising governments & companies on strategies for the networked society.  He lives & works in Luxembourg and Berlin. An excerpt of the podcast can be read at An Economist who practices Service Design.

His areas of interest and expertise are:

  • Leadership and innovation management
  • Service innovation
  • Business model innovation
  • Social business & enterprise 2.0
  • Intellectual capital management & learning organizations
  • Complexity management, trendwatching, backcasting & forecasting
  • Customer experience management, service dominant logic & social CRM
  • Design management, service design & user experience design

Sylvain’s breadth of knowledge in these fields is extraordinary. Though we just grazed the surface, I think you will find the discussion quite insightful.

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

Mobile Version of Business901 Podcast

Where you can find Sylvain:

Developing a Learning A3

Matt Wrye is a Lean Implementer that has a passion for continuous learning on all subjects related to business and lean. He is the author of the popular blog "Beyond Lean," which centers on evolving leadership and changing business.

Our discussion center on his development of a Learning A3. From his blog post Learning A3:

A3s are used for solving problems, developing proposals and everything else.  Why not for laying out a plan to show what people are expected to learn during a project or coaching session.  Layout a standard or plan so expectations and progress becomes visible.

 

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

Below are several formats for your use. I recommend viewing one before or during listening to the podcast.

Learning A3 Example PDF

Learning A3 Blank Template PDF

Learning A3 Blank Excel Template

About Matt: Matt has a Bachelor of Science degree from Purdue University in Industrial Engineering. Among his other accomplishments are Lean Principles and Kaizen Certification from Lean Learning Center, Lean Coach/Mentor, Proficient in Lean tools and concepts, Shainin Red X Certified Journey and Master Candidate, and a ProModel Simulation Software expert.  He is proud to have played a large and significant role in starting the Smith County Lean Consortium in Tyler, TX.

Related Information:
Turning your Conference Learning into Action
A Short Course in Design Thinking
4 Disciplines of Execution – Lean Simplified
Why A3, Why Now in Lean Thinking?

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Learning with Gamification

After reading The Gamification of Learning and Instruction by Dr. Karl Kapp, I felt that not only did I understand the Gaming world better, but was willing to take a stab at trying a few games on my own. Something the author recommends that we all do if we are serious about Gamification. I have already purchased two copies of the book sending the hard copy to a client and a Kindle version for me to use as a reference tool no matter where I may be. A written excerpt from the podcast: Should you Gamify your Simulations?

I will forewarn you; it is not one of my shorter podcast.

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

Mobile Version of Business901 Podcast

About: Karl Kapp is a professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. He teaches a variety of courses to include game design and how to design learning courses and environments, Additionally, as the assistant director of Bloomsburg’s acclaimed Institute for Interactive Technologies (IIT), Dr. Kapp helps government, corporate, and non-profit organizations leverage learning technologies for employee productivity and organizational profitability. In his spare time, he has authored or co-authored four books on the convergence of learning and technology with his latest being The Gamification of Learning and Instruction.

You can find Karl on Twitter @kKapp  or his blog, Kapp Notes.

This is part of a series of blog posts outlined in A Lean Service Design Approach to Gaming your Training.

Accessing the Full Value of the Cloud

Thomas Koulopoulos, author of Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale and Success (Social Century) was my guest on the podcast, The Next Step in Cloud Computing–Humans. Tom is the author of eight books and founder of Delphi Group, a 20-year-old Boston-based think tank, which was named one of the fastest growing private companies in the US by Inc. Magazine. Delphi provides advice on innovation practices and methods to Global 2000 organizations and government agencies.

This is a transcription of the podcast.

Tom is an engaging speaker, (samples at http://tkspeaks.com), and you will find the podcast very entertaining. He left me thinking about the cloud and the possibilities in a totally different way. It’s not about technology. It’s about how we collaborate, work, influence and experience the world!

Related Information:
Process Control Thoughts from the Poppendiecks
Uncommon Thoughts about Service
Time Based Thinking limits Lean Sales and Marketing
Why is ‘x’ the unknown?

The Next Step in Cloud Computing

Tom left me thinking about the cloud and the possibilities in a totally different way. It’s not about technology. It’s about how we collaborate, work, influence and experience the world!

Thomas Koulopoulos, author of Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale and Success (Social Century) is my guest in this Thursday podcast. His work has been praised by luminaries such as Peter Drucker and Tom Peters, who called his writing, “a brilliant vision of where we must take our enterprises to survive and thrive.” And according to the late Peter Drucker, Tom’s writing “makes you question not only the way you run your business but the way you run yourself.”

I ask Tom in the podcast, “Who is going to read his book? He replied; It's not meant for the technologist. It's not a book about technology. It's for the businessperson who wants to understand how they can better leverage these new behaviors in the Cloud. It's for us as individuals, who will need to, in very little ways, be able to surf this tsunami of connections.” Tom is correct; however, he may be too modest. I believe the technologist will enjoy the book tremendously as they see their craft humanized in a way that may cause a little reflection of their own.

While listening to the Podcast – Get your Cloud IQ!

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

Mobile Version of Business901 Podcast

About Thomas Koulopoulos: The author of eight books and founder of Delphi Group, a 20-year-old Boston-based think tank, which was named one of the fastest growing private companies in the US by Inc. Magazine. Delphi provides advice on innovation practices and methods to Global 2000 organizations and government agencies. He is also an Executive in Residence at Bentley University, the past Executive Director of the Babson College Center for Business Innovation, and past Executive Director of the Perot Systems Innovation Lab, which was acquired in 2009 by Dell Computer.

Tom’s Speaking Website: http://tkspeaks.com

Related Information:
Worry about Security in Cloud?
Does Lean create Innovative Companies?
Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell
Process Control Thoughts from the Poppendiecks

How Fast can you get Feedback from your Customer?

At #LSSC!12, I had a chance to listen to Mary Poppendieck’s talk on, Continuous Feedback: Process Control for Developing Software-Intensive Systems. This Thursday, I continue the conversation with both Mary and Tom Poppendieck on the subject of process control in software. This is an excerpt of the podcast.

Joe:  I find it quite interesting that you look at the delivery by a team as no longer an iterative cycle, but one based on flow. Is that the influence of Kanban over scrum or maybe you should tell me what the influence is?

Mary:  Even iterations are a flow when it comes right down to it. If you develop software in two week iterations and actually deliver it every two weeks to customers, that's as much a flow... that's almost continuous.

In fact, when I think of continuous delivery I think of daily or possible twice a week, or weekly. If you look at the kind of delivery that Facebook does, it's once a week with small chunks in the middle of the week.

Gmail for example, is delivered twice a week. Chrome is deployed every day. Those kinds of vary rapid deployments, you find inside of software as a service, where they're websites, or you find them sometimes inside of the enterprises.

The idea of iteration has been, how about we develop software and get it ready to deploy every couple weeks. Well, if you just stop thinking about being ready to deploy and say what would it take to actually deploy it. Just get it out there and start getting the value from it and getting the feedback from it now, you can do that in two week iterations. You can do that with a Kanban system, it doesn't matter.

The optimum thing is how rapidly do we deploy our software rather than how rapidly do we get little chunks of it done.

Tom Poppendieck:  The primary thing that we are advocating is not to think of software development as coding and testing. But rather to think of it as figuring out what is worth doing, what's going to delight the customer, doing it, making sure it's working well, getting it out in service to the customer, and getting feedback from the customer.

The really important metric is how fast you can get feedback from the customer about the actual, deliverable application that you are creating. That is beyond the realm of most people who are thinking about software all by itself. It gets toward the devox on one end and it gets toward the design thinking on the front end.

When we're thinking about flow, we're thinking about rapidly getting feedback from your best design ideas all the way from production.

So, either a two week iteration or a continuous flow like kanban can be rapid, say a couple of weeks to a couple of hours, compared to the very common approach of having dozens of two week iterations before you get any feedback from actual production.

Related Information:

Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for over thirty years. She has managed solutions for companies in several disciplines, including supply chain management, manufacturing systems, and digital media. As a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development, she brings a practical, customer-focused approach to software development problems.

Tom Poppendieck is an enterprise analyst and architect, and an agile process mentor. He focuses on identifying real business value and enabling product teams to realize that value. Tom specializes in understanding customer processes and in effective collaboration of customer, development and support specialists to maximize development efficiency, system flexibility, and business value.

Secrets of a Pitchman Revealed

Kevin Allen is an expert in business development and in leading companies and individuals to achieve their ambitions. Kevin is the author of The Hidden Agenda: A Proven Way to Win Business and Create a Following. He spent two decades on the front lines of business development at the top of advertising giants McCann-WorldGroup, the Interpublic Group and Lowe Worldwide and is recognized as one of the advertising industry's most accomplished growth professionals.

This is a transcription of our podcast, Behind every Decision to Buy..:

One of Kevin’s colleagues coined him the Billion Dollar Man! A veteran of the Interpublic Group and a "Mad Man" of agency McCann Erickson, Kevin worked with such brands as MasterCard, developing the globally famous "Priceless" campaign, Microsoft, Marriott, Smith Barney, Nestle, L'Oreal, Lufthansa and Johnson & Johnson. At McCann, he created what is arguably one of the industry's most envied new business programs, which named McCann Worldgroup the number one agency in new business and Global Agency of the Year, two years in a row. Kevin can be found on the web at Kevin Allen Partners.

Related Information:
Are you Marketing Consumption or Participation?
Moving from Product to Customer Centric in 4 Steps
The Role of Empathy in Design
Connecting Continuous Improvement and Appreciative Inquiry

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Worry about Security in Cloud?

1,000 laptops are lost, stolen or misplaced every week at Los Angeles International Airport. Where's the security there? There is none.

A Thursday podcast this week is with Thomas Koulopoulos, author of Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale and Success (Social Century). Tom is an engaging speaker, (you can find some samples at http://tkspeaks.com), and you will find the podcast very entertaining. He left me thinking about the cloud and the possibilities in a totally different way. It’s not about technology. It’s about how we collaborate, work, influence and experience the world!

Joe: How does the cloud address security? Is it just as comfortable to have it out there somewhere as it is on your own server?

Tom: Well, the first thing that we should talk about, because it's really important, is the perception around security. Let's write that down. One of the concern's people have is, when my information moves from my local hard disk, or from my local server that's housed somewhere where I can lock it up, whether it be in my home or in my office or in some facility, there is this sense that only I control access to it. That's just not true.

If you look at what's happened recently with the alleged hacking of Iranian nuclear-power facilities that are generating potentially material for nuclear weapons, those were devices that were not hooked up to the Internet, by the way. Yet, supposedly, now we don't know this for a fact. From what we've been told, the US government was able to hack into those machines and create some enormous damage to the centrifuges that actually create the nuclear material.

All this happened without anyone being aware until the centrifuges spun out of control. We have this sense that, because we have locked it up, it's not on the Internet; it's not attached to the cloud; it's safe. That's just not the case. Any system can be hacked. Security is a fundamental challenge in any computer‑based system.

I'll give you another example. At Los Angeles International Airport, which I often fly in and out of, in a single week, there are over 1,000 laptops that are lost, stolen or misplaced. That's an astronomical number. I can't get my mind around that, over 1000. It's actually 1200 at last count. Where's the security there? There is none.

As we move to the cloud, we actually create a high level of security and here's why. This is the part that most folks don't often understand. The reason the cloud has the potential to be more secure is because the cloud is constantly on the offensive, constantly looking for patterns and trends that indicate that someone is hacking it or attempting to hack it.

You've got a tremendous ability, because of the resources being applied to the cloud, to be more protective and more diligent around intruders and possible corruption of data than you ever would have on your personal computer or as a small business, what you would be able to bring to bear on that problem would be so small in comparison.

Half of all small businesses don't even back up their local hard drives. Again, where's the security? If the hard drive crashes or a server crashes, where's that information? Half of all businesses don't even back up what they have today. We've got to be very careful here because we can't hold the cloud to some arbitrary 100 percent secure standard, because that standard does not exist.

What does exist in the cloud that is a much more sophisticated ability to constantly be on the watch for security threats. That to me is what we should be talking about. How do we invest in that security in such a way that all of us, small businesses, individuals, large businesses; nations have the ability to protect what needs to be protected? That only happens through a concerted, coordinated effort, which is what you have in the cloud.

Related Information:
Process Control Thoughts from the Poppendiecks
Uncommon Thoughts about Service
Time Based Thinking limits Lean Sales and Marketing
Why is ‘x’ the unknown?

Business Model Innovation with Kaplan

Saul Kaplan (@skap5), the author of The Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When The World is Changing was my guest on the podcast, An Innovation Junkie Interviewed. Saul is the founder and chief catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory (BIF), a real-world laboratory for exploring and testing new business models and social systems.

This is a transcription of the podcast, An Innovation Junkie Interviewed with Saul Kaplan (@skap5), the author of The Business Model Innovation Factory.

About the Book: The Business Model Innovation Factory

Business models don’t last as long as they used to. Historically executives have managed a single business model over their entire careers. Today companies must be capable of designing, prototyping, and experimenting with new business models. Executives will have to launch two to three new business models over their careers. They are not prepared, and corporate innovation efforts focus only on improving performance of existing business models.

This book provides all executives with the tools and survival skills to create a pipeline of new business models in the face of disruptive markets and competition. It will provide an actionable roadmap for executives and workers at all levels to avoid being “netflixed” by doing R&D for new business models.

Related Information:
What’s New in Business Model Generation?
Do You Know the Right Job For Your Products?
Will Product Managers embrace Open Innovation?
Practical Approach to Innovation used by Disney

Process Control Thoughts from the Poppendiecks

At #LSSC!12, I had a chance to listen to Mary Poppendieck’s talk on, Continuous Feedback: Process Control for Developing Software-Intensive Systems. I had a few questions afterwards that developed into an entire podcast.

Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for over thirty years. She has managed solutions for companies in several disciplines, including supply chain management, manufacturing systems, and digital media. As a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development, she brings a practical, customer-focused approach to software development problems.

Tom Poppendieck is an enterprise analyst and architect, and an agile process mentor. He focuses on identifying real business value and enabling product teams to realize that value. Tom specializes in understanding customer processes and in effective collaboration of customer, development and support specialists to maximize development efficiency, system flexibility, and business value.

 

 

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

Mobile Version of Business901 Podcast

Our conversation also spurred several thoughts that I expressed in a recent post, Time Based Thinking limits Lean Sales and Marketing.

Mary and Tom’s Books:
Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point
Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit
Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash

Related Information:
Turning your Conference Learning into Action
Does Lean create Innovative Companies?
Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell.
Lean Kanban lessons from a Software Developer

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Lean Service Design Trilogy

What is the Lean Service Design Trilogy?  Wikipedia defines a trilogy is a set of three works of art that are connected, and that can be seen either as a single work or as three individual works. Lean, Service and Design are certainly works of their own and separate fields of practice. However, when connected, they can be extraordinarily powerful but more importantly simple to understand and implement. In the post, The Marriage in Lean Service Design, I discuss my thoughts of the three disciplines together. I also encourage viewing the introduction presentation a the top of the page. 

I have introduced an eLearning program, Lean Service Design Trilogy that is much different than the  Lean Service Design Workshop.  The Lean Service Design Workshop is part of the Lean Marketing Lab (you must be a member) and is not an eLearning program, rather a 90 day social learning program with live chat option and discussion available.

LSDT

The Lean Service Design Trilogy program is outlined below.

Program Outline:

  1. Week 1: The 5 Lean Principles are discussed not in your typical Lean point of view of reducing waste. We view this as knowledge building exercise with continuous improvement through iterative cycles of learning.
  2. Week 2: Services are discussed in the concepts of gaps and how to recognize, measure and improve them as part of everyday work.
  3. Week 3: How do you innovative within the confines of every day work? Design Thinking concepts are introduced and blended with the other components.
  4. Week 4: Team Engagement and empowering people to put these concepts into practice. You’re the teacher now. How can you engage, implement and spread these ideas? 

Time is spent on application and ways to apply Lean tools in a new context. We will not be attempting to teach you individual tools rather expose you to the use of tools through SDCA, PDCA, and EDCA and give you resources to dig deeper into a tool if needed. If you are not familiar with Lean as a discipline, I encourage membership in the Lean Marketing Lab to expose you to additional sources of information that you may need. If you are looking at how to apply Lean directly to Services or Design this is not the course for you. There are many excellent programs available. I will gladly recommend one for you. This is a course that is highly influenced by Service Design Thinking and Lean as the business process. We will use the Lean methods of SDCA, PDCA and EDCA as they relate to each discipline and the path between Service through SD-Logic (The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing) to Design.

Sign up Now for Lean Service Design Trilogy

How will you measure the success? Dr. James Womack (Jim is not an endorser of this program), originator of Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together and founder of the Lean Enterprise sums it up very well in this short clip.

Sign up Now for Lean Service Design Trilogy. We encourage membership in the Lean Marketing Lab to expose you to additional sources of information but it is not required. Program starts on the following Monday after sign-up. If you sign up on weekend, program will start Monday of the following week (7 days later). Introductory workshop price is $149. Training is immediately applicable to your business.

Related Information: 90 Day Program: Lean Service Design Workshop

Lean Service Design Trilogy Introduction

This is a 35 minute presentation on the principles that the trilogy is based on. Lean Service Design Trilogy eLearning course is highly influenced by Service Design Thinking and Lean as the business process. We will use the Lean methods of SDCA, PDCA and EDCA as they relate to each discipline and the path between Service through SD-Logic (The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing) to Design.

Sign up Now for Lean Service Design Trilogy

This course is ideally suited for…

  • Product Managers
  • Value Stream Managers
  • Sales and Marketing
  • Small Business Owners
  • Consultants
  • Lean Practitioners
  • Design Thinkers
  • Architects
  • Professional Services
  • Service Designers

If you are having trouble making a profit with your services: Sign up Now for Lean Service Design Trilogy

Related Information: Lean Service Design Trilogy

Video credits:
Dan Jones, Lean Enterprise UK
What is Zappos? 
Michael Balle, The Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise
Tim Brown, IDEO
This is Service Design Thinking
Janet McColl-Kennedy, University of Queensland
Dr. James Womack of the Lean Enterprise

Friday, July 13, 2012

The Two Worlds of Service Design

#VDMDesign aka Vincenzo Di Maria is a service designer and co‑founder of Common Ground. His work focuses on socially responsive design and innovation ranging from products to services and experiences. He trained as a designer at Central St. Martin's College of Art Design in London, where he'll be running the Service Design Summer Course the first two weeks of August this year.

Vincenzo will be my guest on next Thursday’s Business901 podcast. His remarks may seem ambivalent at different times in the podcast. However, after listening several times, they became remarkably clear and concise to me. For example, my question in the excerpt, he took to a higher level of thinking than what I originally intended. He inspired me to take a more holistic and less defining approach not only to Service Design, but to other challenges that I encounter. This was one of my most difficult times that I have ever had in choosing an excerpt to publish. There was so many outtakes that I could have used.

Joe: You talked about service design as being very fluid, but it's not really a catch‑all thing. We're just not sitting there defining boundaries to it right now; we're leaving it grow on its own. It's like water, trying to seek its own level.

Vincenzo: I don't see a serious danger in that. I see a series of creative methodologies to be shared across disciplines. Whether we're calling it service design, which is a definition not set in stone. The definition itself is more fluid, why is it fluid? It's fluid because it's made of two worlds, which are fluid in their own rights.

What is design? And what is a service? If we ask people in the street, often, they don't know how to answer. It's very interesting to do this exercise because you may get completely different answers. People, or even clients sometimes, do not understand services. They're invisible. They're intangible, but that's what we use most of the time, even if we don't realize.

The time this morning I woke up, and I went and ate my breakfast and took out some money, and I did a phone call. I already used 50 services probably by then without realizing it. That's the problem. The word service and the word design are fluid concepts still for the majority of people.

We can get quite technical and debating. I can have my own view of service design from a design point of view. I can talk to you from a business marketing perspective, and you can tell me that service design is completely something else. I think that's fine. It just enriches the debate around it.

I don't see any specific danger in transferring some of the learning from one field to another. As you say, the only danger is the boundaries may become a bit blurred, that may just raise confusion in trying to sell service design to clients. How do you get clients to buy into something that is not defined? Lots of people are doing it in Europe. Lots of people are starting in the States as well. I think there is a market, and soon as people start grasping the idea; service design adds value to the user experience, and that is what is valued most. That's what they're going to be investing in.

Want to lean more about Lean Service Design?

Related Information:
A Good Architect is an enabling Orchestra Leader,
Co-Creation and Open Innovation from HYVEinnovation
Do you co-create value with your Customer?
A Service Design Thinking Primer

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

A Strength Based approach to Lean and Six Sigma

Using various strength-based approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry, David Shaked of Almond-Insight has created a radically different way to approach Lean Six Sigma. He calls this method Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma. David is a Master Black Belt formerly with a large global corporation (Johnson & Johnson) and has specific experience in transactional processes such as sales, marketing, finance, order fulfillment, customer services, distribution, demand forecasting.

Building on a recent podcast, Mastering Positive Change with Sarah Lewis, David and I take that conversation into Lean and Six Sigma thinking. 


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

Mobile Version of Business901 Podcast

I have blogged recently, An Appreciative look at the Seven Signs of Value (Waste), about some of David’s work and a workshop in Toronto the week of June 18th that  he will be conducting. 

Related Information:
Using Desired Effects to find Root Cause
The Starting Point for Lean Sales and Marketing
Lean Marketers concentrate on SOAR vs. SWOT
Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

Service Design Approach to 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.

Monday, July 9, 2012

An Economist who practices Service Design

Economist by education, Sylvain Cottong has spent his career at the intersections of business, society, technology, science & culture, with the value of design for process, service & product development and more generally with leadership & innovation. He lives & works in Luxembourg and Berlin. Sylvain is my guest next week on the Business901 podcast and I started out our conversation by asking him…

Joe: I find it pretty interesting that you are an economist who practices innovation. You may have to go back a bit but how did that come about?

Sylvain:  Economists try to measure innovation, especially today. I just wrote a report for the Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy on service innovation. They try to understand what innovation is and how to measure it and how to support it better and what is the criteria, the real criteria that they should take to support companies starting that are innovative, etc. Sylvain Cottong

Innovation is a very economic concept today as we know that we can't really go on with that much more cost-cutting and newer customers or markets because a lot of stuff is saturated.

Innovation gets one of the most important, if not the single most important driver for new value creation. Economists definitely get much more interested in how innovation works, what it is and how to measure it. That's not the easiest stuff for them because innovation is not something that you could measure, like water flow or something like that.

Joe: You hit a key point right there. Even though I come from the process methodology world, I simply don't think faster, better, cheaper works anymore because it's not sustainable. It's the innovation side, and the user and customer experience side is where the growth for your company is located today.

Sylvain: Yes. Of course. I totally agree with you, and I'm also totally convinced about that.

You could also look at it from a different point of view, from the microeconomic point of view, which is about value creation and value perception. What do people consider as value? This is something that might evolve over time. This is dependent on what culturally is going on. This is also dependent how people are connected and can talk to each other, how information is circulating, etc.

This of course, we all know, is something that fundamentally changed since the emergence of the Internet, starting from something like '95 maybe where all these things change. That's also why economists are interested in it because microeconomics is a part of economics, so there's also The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing you might know about Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch writing about Service Dominant Logic in a more academic way, how marketing is changing.

By reading their articles you see that in fact they are talking about the microeconomic paradigm of value. What is value, how does a customer see value? Where does he see value? That's pretty much something I am very interested in and of course from the customer's perspective, and this is also very interesting for economists, because it's where it all starts.

You can find Sylvain at strategybuilders.eu: A Luxembourg based network of international consultants.

Want to lean more about Lean Service Design?

Related Information:
Are you Marketing Consumption or Participation?
Will someone pay for Intangible Value?
The Starting Point for Lean Sales and Marketing
Looking for a Game Changer, Start Underperforming!

Friday, July 6, 2012

The Starting Point for Lean Sales and Marketing

My best approach has been to simply start with developing a culture of PDCA and teamwork through a mini - Hoshin Kanri type plan or the use of the The 4 Disciplines of Execution. I have included a step by step guide called, My First PDCA Cycle. This guide can  be used by one leader with multiple teams, multiple leaders with their own teams, etc. Following 4DExectution strategies, you want this effort to encompass only around 10% of anyone’s time. The remaining 90% should be spent on doing what they normally do. However, people must be held accountable for this 10% and it cannot be only done when there is time. A recent blog post describes the methodology,  4 Disciplines of Execution – Lean Simplified 

I caution you not to jump into the fray with immediate thoughts of waste reduction, data collections efforts and rigid procedures such as scripts and standard work. You first must bridge the gap between operations (supply side thinking) to the sales and marketing side (demand side thinking). It is not the same.

Start with an isolated segment as a prototype. That segment can be a particular value stream, a geographic area or one specific goal (this may include to many people) that has been decided on from your annual Hoshin. The successful ingredient in this equation is that we address specifically one or two goals that can be addressed in the next 90 to 120 days. I recommend not addressing problems but rather aspirations; using the Appreciative Inquiry method of Discovery, Dream, Design and Destiny. When you are dealing with Sales and Marketing, it is important not to be problem solving initially and trying to achieve buy-in but rather taking a positive spin and looking at how to stretch goals and/or increase market share or revenue. This is the language of Sales and Marketing.

Are you ready  to get your Sales and Marketing team off and running?  

Related Information:
The Uniqueness of Hoshin Kanri
Mastering Positive Change eBook
Lean Marketers concentrate on SOAR vs. SWOT
When Standard Work and Customer Focus come together

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Can a Mature Company risk Experimentation?

In next week’s Business901 podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Saul Kaplan, the author of The Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When The World is Changing. An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe:  Can a mature company afford to take that risk, with their brand to do that type of experimentation out there and be transparent with the customer?

Saul:  I would put a counter argument out. Can a mature company afford not to? How many "mature companies" are incredibly vulnerable to being Netflixed to having somebody new come in to their space that does not compete in the traditional industry the way they define it, that is not interested in taking a share of point away from them, but is interested in completely redefining the market and how value is delivered to a customer. If you are a leader and you are watching this activity go on today, and you don't have the capacity to understand it, to do some experimentation of the various models might work, you are going to be disrupted.

I tell the story in the book, about Sony Corporation. Here is a company that is in a world of hurt right now. They watched the entire music business get swept away from them by Steve Jobs and Apple. Should that really have happened to Sony? Think about it, they had a huge division that was in the music business, had under contract some of the world's greatest star performing artists, had another huge division that made the coolest products and new technologies. It even brought us the Walkman for heaven's sake. I am old enough to have had one.

Everybody had one. What happened to Sony? They had all the parts, all the capabilities that they needed to completely change the way music was enjoyed, and delivered to consumers. But they were so stuck in their current business model, and the political infighting between the divisions, that they couldn't do experiments that recombined the parts to do what Steve Jobs ultimately did. Companies the size of Sony, they want to stay competitive, are going to have to create the platforms and the sandboxes to do that experimentation, and put resources in there to be able to play with new business models, because if they don't, someone is going to come along like Apple did, and take them down. This is not going to be the exception in the 21st century, this is going to be the rule.

How do you do that is what I outlined in the book. We don't have all the answers, but we have a lot of experience, tell and share a lot of stories about how you go from tweaks to transformation, and we are beginning a conversation with like‑minded innovation junkies, to be able to explore those ideas and put them into practice.

Related Information:
What’s New in Business Model Generation?
Do You Know the Right Job For Your Products?
Will Product Managers embrace Open Innovation?
Steve Blank on the Lean Startup at Ann Arbor

The Show Business side of Service Design

Business901 podcast guest, Adam St. John (aka Adam Lawrence) of Work-Play-Experience discusses the theatrical aspect of service design and how theater can play a vital role in developing your customer experience. Adam is a professional comedian, business consultant and writer with a background in psychology and the automotive industry. For years he has been using expertise gained in the world of theatre and film to help companies influence their customers. adamsmask

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe:  Theater seems to be the convenient analogy. Is there a deeper relationship between service design and theater?

Adam:  Very much. I always say it's not a metaphor, it's the same thing. I really do fervently believe that. That's my first point, again, really with the comedy. Let's widen up comedy and talk about all kinds of show business whether it's theater or film or music or dance or any of these things. What are they all about? They're all about setting up a process, if you like, or a set of stimuli or a story, whatever you want to call it, setting up a sequence of events which influences somebody's emotion and makes them feel the way you hope they will feel. It always interacts with their own experience, of course, but you're trying to guide them along a certain emotional path. I think service design is the same thing. The experience end of it is a very clear parallel. What do I see, what do I feel, how is it presented to me? That's very clear.

You've got to understand, also, theater is not just performance. Theater is a development tool. Theater is a tool which you can use to model any kind of human interaction very, very quickly, very, very cheaply, and actually quite effectively. It's not just the performance side of theater which interests us; in fact in our work we hardly ever use performance techniques.

What we use are rehearsal techniques which is how a theater goes out there and uses the resources it has on a limited time frame asks itself a question. We have a process here. It's a play in this case but it could be a service design, of course. It says how might this be, how might this turn out in the end, and looks at all the options of doing that in a very fast, very iterative, very full bodied ‑‑ they use their whole body, you don't sit down and think and rehearse, you get up and do.

That brings in much bigger emotional level as well. I think that really is a very big overlap there. We took these tools out of theater, like the rehearsal and other things we can talk about, and said let's apply these to business processes. How can we rehearse a business process?

I just want to point out there rehearsal is not practicing something but it's always the same. Rehearsal, again, is developmental, how might it be. Then you start getting these really, really great insights into the emotionality of things and also the options that you have open to you.

Joe:  Are we scripting everything?

Adam:  That's a very good question because absolutely, emphatically maybe. It depends what you mean by script. I never believe in giving somebody words they have to say. As an actor, of course, I get that all the time. I have a job as acting still and then I get precise words I have to say, but it's always up to me to interpret those. I think in a service environment customers have a very, very good nose for anything which is inauthentic, anything which is not your own words in a very simple level. We believe not in scripting a process down to the word but in exploring the ways it might be, maybe setting up a palette of options that somebody in a front line situation could use with this service and then encouraging them and helping them, again through a rehearsal process, to find their own way to make it authentically theirs and bring it to life.

There's a tension in many people's lives between show business and authenticity because a lot of people think show business is fake. They think it's about a façade, about being sleek, about pretending to do something. That's not a good understanding of actually what show business is.

I love Anthony Hopkins. Sir Anthony Hopkins, one of my favorite actors. When Sir Anthony Hopkins plays Hannibal Lector if he were pretending it wouldn't be scary. The reason it's scary is because he shows part of himself, something that's inside all of us, to make that role possible.

Theater is really not about pretending to be something. It's about choosing which aspect of you to show. It's actually about getting better at showing who you really are and that, I think, is something service design can really use, that point of what values do we have here? How can we show those values in a controlled, conscious way to make a rock and roll experience for our customer?

Related Information:
Gamestorming for Service Design
Service Design via a Design Thinker ebook
Do you co-create value with your Customer?
A Service Design Thinking Primer

Time Based Thinking limits Lean Sales and Marketing

Lean has an infatuation with time, just look: Lead Time, Takt Time, Cycle Time, Machine Time, Process Time, Value Add Time, etc. With all this time-based thinking what it the first thing we try to do when applying Lean to Sales and Marketing?

The first step involves mapping our sales cycle looking for waste and improving the total time from the beginning to the end of the entire stream. This is great stuff! The power of the Value Stream Mapping process is that it enables the team to see the entire picture. We know waste in marketing is not as readily identified as in other areas. But one example of sales and marketing waste that can be identified is sales cycle time. We can even get agreement that the longer a customer/prospect stays in one of the process stages of the value stream or in the queue waiting to go from one stage to the next, the greater the chance of losing the customer.

We know enough to look at how to optimize the entire process instead of just a particular stage. Therefore, our first step would be to evaluate the total time spent, not resources allocated or used. Moving through the value stream quicker is many times just a matter of evaluating the internal delays that occur in the process. By removing them, we enable the customer to make faster and better decisions. We also create more credibility with our customer for ourselves as the “go to guy (organization)” and as an organization that has done this before.

It makes sense, the perfect application to apply Lean to Sales and Marketing. You try to find the one best path – the value stream. It is easy; we have already created a marketing funnel to allow us to readily identify the process. We just need to use a few Lean Tools to bring the process under control.

Houston, we have a problem! Organizations can no longer feed products to customers, as I described in the blog post, Kill the Sales and Marketing Funnel and in a few other posts that you can find on this blog under the Marketing Funnel Category.

In the process of interviewing Mary and Tom Poppendieck for an upcoming Business901 podcast, I got off the subject and discussed project versus product management. Afterwards, they sent me an excerpt from their second book, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash. In the excerpt (which I have paraphrased and shorten) they gave the typical description of projects; they are funded and have a beginning and an end. Success is than measured based on whether or not the cost, schedule and scope commitments are met.

This mimics many of our traditional thoughts in sales and marketing. When we try to apply Lean to Sales and marketing it is re-emphasized. Project thinking is basically closing a sale in the shortest amount of time.

What if we treaded our sales cycles more like a product than a project? What if we treated scope (what we will do) with an expectation that it will evolve as knowledge is gained (My book, Marketing with PDCA discusses that 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). What if we viewed success on engagement and dollars (lifetime preferably) per customer? Or increase in market share? Or even rewards based on number of long term customers? What if funding occurred not on monthly budgets but incrementally on engagement?

The overwhelming theme that has evolved is that engagement has replaced time as a defining metric in sales and marketing. An example is one of the defining metrics at a retail store, time spent. We have always viewed that the more time spent in the store, the more purchased. If we take this thinking and put an interactive component to it and rather than view time spent in the store but the experience and level of engagement created with the customer at the store and online, time becomes relatively in material. It is the experience.

How does Lean apply? Forrester Research identifies four measures of increasing engagement as Influence (Plan), Interaction (Do), Intimacy (Check), and Influence (Act). As you may notice, I assign the PDCA cycle to these measures of engagement as a way of combining Lean Thinking to the Engagement cycle. Demonstrating a shared outcome with your customers should be the ultimate strategy of your organization and your PDCA improvement cycles. Many organizations still view improving capabilities of internal processes in sales and marketing as an effective strategy; such as the reduction of cycle time. The strategies that we need for improvement must be on the demand side. We must simply focus on the customer, not internally. We do not live in a world of excess demand. As a result, our planning cannot be isolated. It is only validated through customer engagement, not a time-based derivative.

Related Information:
PDCA Cycle of Zingerman’s Deli
In love with your products more than your customers?
PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation
Lean Marketing Creates Knowledge for the Customer

The Future of Lean with Dan Jones

I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the noted experts in the Lean Community, Dan Jones.  Dan is a management thought leader and advisor on applying lean, process thinking to every type of business across the world. He is the founding Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy www.leanuk.org in the UK, dedicated to pushing forward the frontiers of lean thinking and helping others with its implementation.

Dan JonesDaniel Jones is the co-author, with James P Womack, of the influential, best-selling management books:
The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production
Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated
Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together
Seeing the Whole Value Stream.

Dan will not disappoint you in this podcast. Though he is firmly rooted in the principles of Lean, you may be surprised by his forward-thinking and interpretation.  An excerpt can be read in this blog post, The Challenge of Lean with Dan Jones.

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

Related Information:
Has Lean Thinking fallen short on the Demand Side?
Thinking Back from the Customer –Lean Summit 2011
4 Disciplines of Execution – Lean Simplified
Defining the Roles of Lean IT