Top 10 Reasons to Have an Ezine

I recently switched e-mail providers to Get Response. Here is an affiliate post that I think you may find interesting on why you should have an Ezine.

1. Establish yourself as a trusted expert. People search online for information and will look to you, as a subject matter expert, to provide it to them. Every week (or whatever schedule works) provides an opportunity to build on this, while reinforcing your brand.

2. Build a relationship with the people on your list. It's common knowledge that people like to buy from people they like. By using ezines to connect with readers in their homes, you can develop a relationship of familiarity and trust. Be sure to share a little about yourself or your company in every issue, whether it is an anecdote, event, or employee spotlight.

3. Keep in touch with prospects and clients. Consideration should be given to eventually developing two ezines: one for prospects and one for clients, as each require different information. This is a great way to notify your readers of weekly specials or upcoming product launches, offer new articles or customer stories, and provide links (or urls) to updated FAQs, blogs and splash pages.

4. Drive traffic to your website or blog. As noted in #3, remember to call attention to new blog posts or other changes to your website with links directly to those pages. Remind readers of your online newsletter archives. Promote special sales (maybe with discount coupon codes only for subscribers) with a link to the sales page. Use links to turn your ezines and newsletters into "silent salespersons"– driving traffic to your website and building your lists around the clock.

5. Build content on your website. Make a habit to adding your ezines and newsletters to your website in an archive area. This serves a several important purposes:

   • Visitors can read an issue or two to determine if your ezine will be of interest to them, which could help to increase sign-ups and potential sales.

   • If you optimize your article placements, you will not only make your website "meatier", but you'll also bring new traffic from the search engines.

6. Get feedback from your readers. Make it easy for you to stay in touch with prospects and customers and vice versa. Ask them to take action and comment on your articles and offers. Conduct polls and surveys. Start a "Letters to the Editor" column in your ezine. Feedback allows you to fine tune your messages, target your marketing, and expand your product line. It's also great for relationship building!

7. Develop an information product. If you deliver your newsletter once a week and include two articles, at the end of a year you'll have 104 well-researched articles in your portfolio! Pick the best-of-the-best and turn them into a bonus ebook for opting-in to your list, submit to download sites to build your list, or sell in PDF-format!

8. Grow your mailing list. Let your ezine subscribers work for you. Be sure to remind your readers that it's okay to forward your newsletter to anyone they'd like. In addition, it's important to include sign-up instructions for those who received your ezine from viral marketing methods. A simple line titled, "Get Your Own Copy of XXXXXX", with a link to your squeeze or opt-in page is all it takes!

9. Gather demographic data. By offering surveys, feedback forms, and niche reports, you'll be able to get valuable information about your prospects and customers. Learn what makes your readers tick, how to better serve them, and how to give them what they want. Make sure they become repeat customers!

10. Save money! All of the above benefits of publishing an ezine are free or almost free. The small cost of a top-rated ezine publishing system is nothing compared to the cost of brochures, business cards, advertising, direct mail, pay-per-click or other means of promotion. Not only that, but someone has to manage that production! Because your newsletter is delivered online, you can grow your list to be as large as you want without worrying about the expense. Bottom line − it's proven that email marketing is the most cost-effective marketing solution for companies just like yours!

Would like to learn more about Get Response?

Technorati Tags: get response,email marketing,squeeze page,ezine,blog

Leveling your organization thru Lean Sales And Marketing

I am not sure that Lean will ever work within a company unless sales and marketing are on board. In fact, why start with production if we want to look from the customer’s eyes. Would it not be tainted if we do not Lean sales and marketing first?

Have you ever won a large order and watch your production department roll their eyes? You could never understand why the frustration. In fact, you wonder why they just don't have the same enthusiasm you do. Instead, you wonder why they just can’t take the attitude of lets “gitter-done!” I would encourage you to take a little deeper look in the frustration and especially if you've been trying to become a Lean operation.

Let's face it, a manufacturing manager who does not meet the promised date or deliver quality parts does not keep his job long. There is an expectation to be on schedule. What about Sales? Is there the same level of accountability? That new order causes a wide variation in demand from what was planned to be booked. Who makes up for that deviation? The production department does. It is justified of course by the age old sayings; Customers don't know what they want or our type of business is hard to forecast. I read once where it was stated that greater than 90% of this delivery dates are missed at the time the order was accepted. This double standard is unacceptable and in fact quite detrimental to a Lean Transformation. But for this not to happen, you must learn how to market and sell products differently.

First, just think about how you typically measure sales people and for that matter your customers. Companies usually provide incentives to their salespeople based upon the volume of sales. You even have pricing policies that reward customers for buying large quantities of products. Does this sound like Lean principles in action? In fact, they are just downright harmful to a lean operation.

A lean operation works best when there is a level production load. So you must try some new approaches to pricing and most particularly to incentives and measurements. If your sales and marketing understand the Value Stream of your company, they will also recognize the capacity restraints or bottlenecks that are within it. All at once they will start recognizing value over the cost of the product. If a part is difficult to get they will assessing more value to it. They may not be as willing to discount that product or at a minimum hesitate to promise an unrealistic delivery.

Can you create a linear demand with your customers? Sales and Marketing could work with customers to develop processes more conductive to lean operation. Such as many of the initiatives that Xerox has done. Maybe setting up Kanban systems, vendor managed inventory, smaller daily orders, rather than large weekly or monthly orders, forward forecast requirements, and others. You would also expect sales and marketing to develop more appropriate incentives to increase demand for non-bottleneck products. This is especially important because these sales can be increase without increasing other costs.

The purpose of all this is to recognize the Value Stream of your operations and maximize all the components of it. BY the WAY - How much would a Leveling Sales and Marketing initiative cost to implement? What value would you receive from it?

Technorati Tags: Lean,Lean Transformation,Sales and Marketing,Lean Marketing

Why Do You Market the Way You Do?

Have you ever questioned the assumptions that inspire your marketing? Have you asked yourself whether there is a better way to make your marketing more effective? I believe there is a tremendous amount that marketers can learn from Lean Development process.

Dr. Robert Charente of ITABHI Corporation developed the principles of lean development (LD) in the early 1990’s as not only a strategic as well as tactical business approach for the creation of change-tolerant business software intensive systems, systems that can rapidly adapt to or help in the creation of business change. He sets these lofty targets in his developments:

• 1/3 the human effort
• 1/3 the development hours
• 1/3 the time
• 1/3 the investment in tools and methods
• 1/3 the effort to adapt to a new market environment

Why the 1/3 targets? These goals are meant to challenge status quo thinking. Without audacious goals, ones that seem impossible to reach business managers won’t bother to think about the issues of software development in entirely different ways.

Could your marketing achieve 1/3 targets? Could you achieve them while providing more value to the customer? Can you think about your marketing in a totally different way?

Bob Charente expanded the thoughts of Lean Development to these 12 principles:

1. Satisfying the customer is the highest priority.
2. Always provide the best value for the money.
3. Success depends on active customer participation.
4. Every LD project is a team effort.
5. Everything is changeable.
6. Domain, not point, solutions.
7. Complete, don't construct.
8. An 80 percent solution today instead of 100 percent solution tomorrow.
9. Minimalism is essential.
10. Needs determine technology.
11. Product growth is feature growth, not size growth.
12. Never push LD beyond its limits.

You can read an expanded version of these 12 principles on the ITABHI Corporation website.

Lean Development focuses on the creation of change-tolerant software. Setting up this model for marketing could be quite interesting. How flexible, how change- tolerant is your marketing? Why are you marketing the way you do? Is it the way that your customer wants you too?

Photo Credit by hanneorla

Technorati Tags: Lean,Lean Development,Value Stream,Agile,Marketing,Agile Marketing,Lean Marketing

Using Excel for Value Stream Mapping Discussion

Systems2win a supplier of Excel Templates for Lean Kaizen Continuous improvement tools has introduced the Value Stream Mapping section of the Lean Starter Toolkit that includes a selection of downloadable templates, videos and instructions. This is a free downloadable trial package that covers Value Stream Mapping, and is part of a collection of over twenty templates in the Lean Starter Kit. The Systems2win Word and Excel templates and free online training are relevant to any type of organization pursuing a continuous improvement effort.

I had a chance to catch up with Dean Ziegler, founder of Systems2win and had this discussion about his new Lean Starter kit and more specifically the Value Stream Mapping Templates . Disclaimer: There is a business relationship that exist between Business901 and Systems2win at the time of this writing.

Joe Dager: You use Excel as a drawing tool. Why?

Dean Ziegler: Once someone completes the 13-minute video to learn how to use Excel as a drawing tool – they will wonder why they ever bought Visio. Drawing is the easy part. Excel has all of the drawing capabilities of Visio, but Visio can’t do math. And once your managers get over being enamored with the pretty pictures, they are going to start asking the tough questions that are the entire reason for making a value stream map in the first place. ‘How much will we save? Why are we focusing on this instead of that?’ And that’s when people realize that their entry-level drawing tool doesn’t really answer the questions that a value stream map is intended to answer.

Joe: What if I am new to Excel or even Lean, can I still benefit from your templates?

Dean: If you are new to Excel or the Tools of Lean, Systems2win offers one of the largest collections of on-line training resources free during your trial period. Free online training is one of the strengths behind our product offerings. There are built in support features each and every time you open a document. So we encourage newcomers to use our free training if nothing else to start or expand your Lean Journey.

Joe: If they are just Word and Excel templates, why don’t I just create them?

Dean: We want people to know that many of our Systems2win templates are just plain simple. In the past, we only gave away our most complex templates as trials, but now we’re giving some of the simple ones too. Our best prospect is someone that has already spent several late nights attempting to create a few of their own home-made templates, and can now truly appreciate how much time these save – and how much more professional the end results.

There has been a few discussion that I have participated in on the use of templates, so I thought I would go straight to the horse’s mouth per say. We have an expanded version of this discussion that I will release soon but thought that this was a good viewpoint on the use of templates.

Technorati Tags: Lean,Value Stream Mapping,Six Sigma,Excel,Word,Templates

Related Posts:

Value Stream Mapping
Draw your Value Stream Map in Excel

Are you running numerous Kaizen Events, should you be?

This weeks Business901 podcast, will feature Karen Martin the co-author of  The Kaizen Event Planner: Achieving Rapid Improvement in Office, Service and Technical Environments as a quick introduction to my Kaizen week I thought I would start out with one of the first questions I asked Karen in the interview:

Joe:  So when you say that they run numerous Kaizen Events or actually, I noticed one thing on your website where you say a typical organization of a hundred people, only have four Kaizen Events a year. So, a Kaizen Event is different than a continuous improvement process or your weekly meeting for continuous improvement process. What is the difference?

Karen:  Yes. Good question. So, Kaizen Events are this formalized, structured approach to making rapid improvement, whereas, really, what the goal is of any organization is to develop a Kaizen culture. In the Kaizen culture, improvement happens continuously. It happens without the need for those formalized process that involves a tremendous amount of planning, and really, quite a bit of effort. In fact, Kaizen Events can be quite painful for an organization because of the number of people they have to pull off their regular jobs and sequester them for two to five days. They're really only reserved for the most intense types of improvements that need to be made.

What some organizations do, and one of the criticisms of Kaizen Events, is that they'll get hooked on Kaizen Events and only make improvement during a formal event. That's not at all the intention of a Kaizen Event. So, I view them as a good way to indoctrinate an organization into the improvement process and teach the skills.

In fact, you'll hear Kaizen Events referred to as Kaizen Workshops and Kaizen Blitz. The workshop term reflects the deep learning that occurs in a Kaizen that if it's well facilitated. So, it is true that there's a risk that organizations can become dependent on Kaizen Events and use them for all‑improvement and never really evolve into that Kaizen culture.

But, I do believe that it's a very good first step. Often, for many, many years, I think, non‑manufacturing organizations, in particular, can benefit from Kaizen Events. This is to get the culture embedded into the DNA of the organization, this whole concept of continuous improvement.

In the podcast, Karen goes into much depth in White Collar Kaizen. I think you will enjoy it. I found it very interesting that she points out that in the beginning of implementing a continuous improvement  culture that you need to have well structured events. I think it holds very true for Inbound Marketing. This concept is still foreign to most and they struggle with that concept. I wondered if it was going to become “mainstream” and by the looks of the decreasing effectiveness of outbound marking tactics, it is probably going to win by default.  

Social Media Slant: I find the need for these types of events in the new wave of marketing, Social Media. I seldom see the necessary steps taken to instill a solid foundation before organizations are off blogging, twittering, etc. Spending time watching and listening seems downright silly to most. A well found strategy for social media is very apparent to the more seasoned social media player. The reason, I believe it is that the majority of the “Seasoned Players” already know how much time they have wasted getting up to speed (joke, but a lot of truth in it). I have been encouraging my clients to take several 10 minute Twitter breaks in lieu of the standard coffee break, just to get the flavor of that form of social media. I think Social Media will become embedded in the culture and conversations of most companies in the not to distant future. Holding a few Kaizen Events might not hurt. Learn more about it this week!

Related Blog Posts:

A Kaizen Event is one of the most popular ways to rapidly improve a process and make the gains stick. Or is it?

A Preview to Kaizen Week

Technorati Tags: Kaizen,Lean,White-Collar,Office-Environment,Kaizen Event,Kaizen Template

Design for Lean Six Sigma, The Xerox Way - E-book

These innovations are examples of how Xerox uses Lean Six Sigma methodologies:

Outside Innovation at Xerox: At Ingersoll Rand, Xerox has secured a 9-year contract by saving the diversified industrial firm millions by better managing company-wide print spending. Using a Lean Six Sigma-based approach, Xerox will design a print environment with the appropriate number of output devices, like printers, fax machines, copiers and scanners, to help employees work more efficiently.

Inside Innovation at Xerox: Xerox Scientists developed a chemical armor to extend the lifespan of printer components. DfLSS tools were a big part of the breakthrough technology which involves the development of a chemical armor that protects photoreceptors, the light-sensitive elements in xerographic machines.

In this e-book and the previous podcast, Jeffrey M. Koff, the Director of Lean Six Sigma Learning and Corporate Lean Six Sigma Operations for Xerox Corporation discusses Lean Six Sigma as a major Xerox initiative for driving new levels of business performance, product offerings, and results based on the customer-centered, industry-recognized methodologies.

Design for Lean Six Sigma, The Xerox Way -

Related Posts:

Design for Lean Six Sigma, The Xerox Way

The Kaizen Event, A Critical Component of Xerox’s Customer Experience

Learn more about the Xerox Design for Lean Six Sigma

E-book on Lean Six Sigma Advocacy at Xerox

Lean Six Sigma Advocacy at Xerox

Technorati Tags: Design,DfLSS,Lean,Six Sigma,Xerox

New formula for success: Deliver Today, Adapt tomorrow

I have been discussing Agile Marketing lately and recently came up on a blog post by Chris Brogan on “How We Make Businesses These Days” Chris stated in his post:

Think. Sketch. Execute. Revise

To me, the new formula of business is this: think. sketch. execute. revise. It’s important to consider contingencies. It’s important to be prepared for what can go wrong. But the best way to find out what’s going to go wrong is to launch and find the flaws.

This is top of mind to me right now, as I’m about to launch a business in a marketplace that I don’t fully understand, with a product that I’m still developing, to a bunch of people who I don’t necessarily have neatly corralled. Am I afraid? Not at all. I’ve got smart collaborators. We’ll figure it out. Will we upset someone along the way? No question. Tell me one business that hasn’t made a mistake. The goal, I imagine, is not to make any fatal mistakes.

Think. Sketch. Execute. Revise.

That looks very close to the iterative process of the five phases of Agile Project Management(book link below) and described by Jim Highsmith. I adapted the description to a marketing tone.

Envision. Speculate. Explore. Adapt. Close.

How closely it resembles it you need to have a definition of each term to see the similarities:

1. Envision: Determine your marketing vision and objectives and constraints, your community, and how your team will work together.
2. Speculate: develop the capability and/or feature based launch to deliver on the vision.
3. Explore: plan and deliver running tested stories in the short iteration, constantly seeking to reduce the risk and uncertainty of the launch.
4. Adapt: review the delivered results, the current situation, and the team's performance, and adapt as necessary.
5. Close: conclude the launch, pass along key learning, and celebrate.

But even more so the real key point is that we're not concentrating on the flow were concentrating on the cycle. Continuous short iterations are constantly happening to improve the value of the offering. No longer can we wait for the perfect scenario. We build the scenario as an ongoing process. Customer relationships need to be his collaborative as possible. Customers then can define the capabilities needed to provide value. When that scenario could no longer be adapted or improved upon the life of that marketing cycle is over or exhausted. This effort enables customers to define the value and judge your marketing cycle. Your marketing team must always be in contact with the customer and continuously asking: Is what we are doing providing value in your decision making process for our product or service?

Envision. Speculate. Explore. Adapt. Close.

Related Posts:

Improve your Marketing Cycle, Increase your Revenue

Can you have Agile Marketing?

Start thinking Cycles, not Funnels in your marketing! 

Inspiration provided by Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products (2nd Edition)

Technorati Tags: Agile Marketing,Agile Project Development,Lean,Marketing Cycle,Chris Brogan

Be Different or Be Dead Author Roy Osing Interviewed

My podcast next week will feature Roy Osing, the author of Be Different or Be Dead, Your Business Survival Guide. This is a little different, no pun attended, from my regular podcast but differentiation is a key term in my upcoming blogs so for me it was very appropriate and timely.

Lance Henderson of the The Bellingham Business Journal interviewed Roy this week. An excerpt is below. If you would like to read the entire interview, please click on the preceding link. 

The Bellingham Business Journal: Why do you think being different is key to business survival?

Roy Osing: Right now, the marketplace is characterized by a ton of competitors, a whole bunch of communications clutter, multiple choices, the Internet, which empowers people to research who they want to do business with, and fickle customers, who will leave you in a heartbeat for a better offer. Given those dynamics, businesses need to create relevant, compelling and unique reasons why people should buy from them. If they can’t, they won’t and if they don’t buy from you, you’ll die. It’s as simple as that.

My thesis is to be relevant and understand the compelling needs of your customer, create unique value that only you provide and deliver it flawlessly. If you can do that, you’ll not only survive, you’ll thrive. Your top line will go through the roof and you won’t have to worry about survival because you will be so busy growing.

BBJ: Why is this message relevant in today’s economy?

Roy: This material wasn’t created because of the recession. It was created independent of any economic cycle. The reality is it has applications in every economic cycle because they are basic fundamental axioms to succeed. In these recessionary times, I say, ‘Guys, let’s take a step back and a deep breath and let’s renew our business. You have an opportunity here.’ I think of the recession as a friend, in a way, if it forces you to reflect on creating a “Be Different” strategy for your business. It is an opportunity to reform yourself and be successful and survive even in a recession.

When times are really good, you can hide a lot in a business. If your top line is healthy, you can hide a lot of inefficiencies, but in a recession, you stand raw naked to the world.

P.S. Check out the BE DiFFERENT Quiz on Roy’s website http://www.bedifferentorbedead.com/quiz/. This tool is a fun way of assessing whether an organization is living the BE DiFFERENT Practices or not. It tells you whether your organization is DiFFERENT or dead :) People have enjoyed this and it is a very popular section of his site.

Technorati Tags: strategy and planing,marketing sales,customer service,differentiation

Using Lean at the Dentist!

Dr. Sami Bahri was my guest on the Business901 podcast. He delivered a message that all professionals should listen too. While 33% of most Dentist practices are shrinking in today’s marketplace, Dr. Bahri’s is expanding. 

Dr Sami Bahri, DDS runs a private dental practice in Jacksonville, Florida. The practice has three general dentists, one orthodontist, 10 chairs for general dentistry, and seven chairs for orthodontics.

In 1990, after ten years of intense work in the teaching, administrative and private practice fields, Dr Bahri moved to Jacksonville, Florida. In the same year he opened his first Jacksonville practice with two dental chairs. He studied dental management and applied it in his practice.

Eager to know how other industries manage their resources to satisfy their customers, he started searching outside dentistry, in the mainstream where many management experts are continuously trying to improve the way things are done. He studied most management systems available to the public and tried them in his practice; systems like Total Quality Management, Six Sigma and Lean Management—to mention the most important ones.

In 1996, Dr. Bahri read "Lean Thinking” by James Womack and Daniel Jones, and started implementing Lean Management principles in his dental office. He is the first dentist known to utilize Lean Management techniques to continuously improve the delivery of quality dental care. Dr Bahri has been called “The Leanest Dentist on the Planet.” This implementation has benefited patients, employees, dental laboratories, suppliers, etc. In 2006, Bahri Dental Group provided the same amount of dental treatments as 2005, but needed 40 percent less resources, thanks to the application of “Lean Dental Management.”

In March of 2007, Dr Bahri was invited to present his work as a keynote speaker at the “Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing” where he was recognized as the “World's First Lean Dentist”. In March of 2009, Dr Bahri wrote Follow the Learner: The Role of a Leader in Creating a Lean Culture, published by the Lean Enterprise Institute. He lectures nationally and internationally to share his experience on implementing lean management in the dental practice.

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P.S. On the LeanBlog Video Podcast hosted by Mark Graban, he had a new discussion with Dr. Bahri. They talked about lessons he has learned from touring factories and why focusing on single piece flow is a key to true Lean success, even for a dentist's office.

Related Information:

The Florida Times-Union

LeanBlog.org Podcast

Bahri Dental Practice

Technorati Tags: lean,lean dentist,professional practice,professional services,dentist,orthodontics

A Professional Practice utilizing Lean Concepts

I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Sami Bahri the first dentist known to utilize Lean Management techniques to continuously improve the delivery of quality dental care. This implementation has benefited patients, employees, dental laboratories, suppliers, etc. In 2006, Bahri Dental Group provided the same amount of dental treatments as 2005, but needed 40 percent less resources, thanks to the application of “Lean Dental Management.”

An excerpt from the Podcast:

Joe:  What have you learned from this that you think applies to other professional practices?

Sami:  I think Joe, not only Lean, but any management theory. I am going to talk about the same ones that we already mentioned; TQM, Theory of Constraints, Six Sigma; they all apply to anything that you are doing.

Joe:  They all apply to a process and if you are doing a process they apply.

Sami:  You can use any, right? So it is just which system or which theory gives you the best results. And so far, in our practice, Lean has given the best results. I really think it applies to everything. Now the key is what do we teach people? And my experience is really in that regard. I learned it on my own from books and I have fallen in a few traps. The first one, the first trap that I fell in would be eliminating waste. You teach someone who doesn't know about Lean and you say, "Lean is about eliminating waste." And you say anything that you do not need to apply right away is a waste.

So what we did was looking around us and eliminating waste and eliminating waste going nowhere. Why? Because, we were not eliminating waste in our main flow, the patient. I would eliminate waste at the front desk and the way they are handling insurance. Or how they are filing insurance, or verifying insurance.

But, I was still making several appointments for my patient. Until we decided what our main flow is. The principal flow is the patient flow. Anything else: like how to prepare the appointment, how to set up the room, how to prepare the insurance verification and the patient's file in the computer. All of these are support flows.

As long as you are working on improving your support flows without really paying attention to the main flow, we didn't see any improvements. My main message would be if you want to learn the Lean tools at least learn them while you are improving your principal flow. Decide what your principal flow is and work on that. That is where Lean is. Anything else like improving operations which is the same as support flows did not give us the results that we were looking for. That is probably one of the main lessons that I learned.

Dr. Sami Bahri Book: Follow the Learner: The Role of a Leader in Creating a Lean Culture (Amazon Link)

Technorati Tags: Lean,Lean Dentist,Professional Practice,Professional Services,Dentist,Orthodontist

Thinking about Lean this year?

Here is a question I asked Jim Lewis, author of the Story of a Lean Journey and co-author of a soon to be released book titled “The Perry Story”.

Joe: Now you've talked a lot about the benefits someone can get from Lean by doing it, but how tough is it to achieve? I mean, is it doable? Is it doable in three months? Six months? I could be out of business in six months. Is it something that really can be done in the short term, or is it something that takes a long time?

Jim: Yes to both of those. And let me explain that. Lean is a journey. You're transforming your business from wherever it is today to a new way of doing business.

It is a journey. Another reason for using an outside person is because usually internal resources don't have a full comprehension, unless they are Lean experts themselves, they don't have a full comprehension of the commitment that's necessary in order to make this journey, and they really don't know how this journey is going to unfold.

There's an 80/20 rule that applies to anything and everything, and it applies to Lean as well. The transformation process is not complete until it becomes self‑sustainable, where you forget what the old was. You can't even remember what the old was.

I mention that in my book, once the transformation reaches that point where you can no longer remember what the old way was, then you are well on your way to a successful journey. And that takes probably three to five years before the process becomes the new norm ‑ the Lean now is the new norm.

Businesses have been doing business the way they have for years, since the Industrial Revolution of the 1850s. So we've been ingrained in us this 'batch ' mentality of doing business for so long that it takes a long time to change the culture. And that's what you're doing, you're changing the culture in the organization, and so that takes three to five years.

But the 80‑20rule applies to that. You will get immediate results from a Lean Initiative, from day one. As soon as you begin to implement, you get positive results. I usually work with a company, either full‑time or part-time depending on the organization for six to eight months.

From day one, I'm weaning myself away from the organization because I don't want them totally dependent on me. I want them to be able to begin to take ownership and responsibility for the transformation themselves. I'll usually find a key individual in the organization who I can work with closely, who's going to take over the mantle as I leave.

That person will take the mantle of responsibility for ensuring that the transformation process continues to move forward until the entire culture is changed.

It's not just changing the culture of the workers in the organization. The management, the leadership of the organization has to change their culture as well. They're no longer task managers. They're going to work in a collaborative way. I'm not talking about self‑managed work teams. I'm talking about working with people in a collaborative way, and problem solving, and soliciting input and ideas, and suggestions and recommendations.

Empowering is another one of the E's. It's empowering the staff to be able to make change happen in their area of control. Managers are going to be relinquishing some control in that transformation process, where they go to a team‑based activity versus a traditional, task‑managed operation.

It does take a long time, but the results are immediate. If you can get through that cultural shift change and have a sustainable operation, then Lean becomes the new norm, and you forget where you were.

Related Information:

The Perry Story

Considering Lean, Check out this Lean Journey (Podcast)

Value Stream Mapping Tools

Technorati Tags: Lean,Value Stream Mapping,Lean Culture,Lean Transformation