Smarter than a Monkey with your Money

A surprising outcome when moneys are giving the same choices as humans. Find out how risk adverse you are…

About: Dr. Laurie Santos, who has been called "the Monkey Whisperer," studies the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. She'll discuss her recent work on "monkey economics" and will show that some of the silly financial choices seen in humans can be observed in monkeys too. Come hear the intriguing thoughts of the woman recently voted one of Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10" Young Minds.

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How Zing Training Started! -

Next week’s Business901 Podcast features Ari Weinzweig, CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Mich. The Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) has annual sales approaching $40 million. ZingTrain, a consulting and training company that shares Zingerman’s approach to business with like-minded organizations from around the world, and offers a variety of management training seminars in Ann Arbor, as well as customized workshops and presentations at client sites. An excerpt from the podcast: 

Joe:  A big part of your organization has become Zing Training. What started that? Did you just wake up one day and say, "Gee, we need to bottle this up?"

Ari:  ‘Well, we opened in '82, and then in '93, Paul and I spent about a year writing a new vision for the business. When we opened, we were very clear about our vision. And actually the first natural law of business, I think, is organizations that have a clear vision of greatness are going to have a better shot at succeeding. So when we opened in '82, we were very clear in our minds and what we wrote down that we only wanted one deli. We didn't want a chain or replicas. We knew that we wanted something that was unique to us and not a copy of something from New York, or Chicago, or LA.

We knew that we wanted really great food and service but in a very accessible setting, and that we wanted a really great place for people to work, and to be bonded into the community. By '93, so 10, 11 years in, I mean, we kind of had done that. In that, we had filled in, expanded twice on the site that we're on.

We're in the historic district, so it's not easy to do that. We kind of had, I guess in hindsight what would be the equivalent of an organizational "midlife struggle."

I don't think it was a crisis, because we weren't crashing, but we weren't really clear on where we were going. We had achieved what we had set out to do despite going against the odds. So we spent about a year coming up with our next vision, which we wrote out.

It was called Zingerman's 2009, so it was for 15 years into the future. That vision outlined that we would have a community of businesses all here in the Ann Arbor area, because we like to be connected to what we're doing.

Each building should be a Zingerman's business, but each would have its own unique specialty. So that way, we could grow but keep the deli unique, and do other things. And we would only do a business when we had a managing partner or partners in it that would own part of that business and have a passion for whatever that business did, and be connected to it every day going for greatness.

And after we wrote that vision and rolled it out, then Maggie Bayless‑‑who we had known at the restaurant‑‑ she had been, I mentioned a waitress there. But she had gone back to school and gotten her MBA at Michigan, and wasn't that thrilled with the corporate world, but loved training.

She read that vision. She came to us and said, "Well, what about doing a Zingerman's training business?" That's how it started, then we worked on it for a while and opened it up in 1994.”

I have written about Zingerman’s many timese and in fact, Ari’s book,Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service, provided the service outline for a retail operation that I was part of for several years.  Several mindmaps and more details are in this blog post,  PDCA Cycle of Zingerman’s Deli.

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Turning your Conference Learning into Action

I attended an outstanding conference (#LSSC12), The Lean Software & Systems Conference 2012 held in Boston, MA. In addition to the conference there was 2 days of tutorials, Lean Camp (Open Space), Interactive Cooking, Living Room, Lightning Talks, and Lean Coffee. It was an excellent agenda and well-hosted by the Lean-Kanban University.  Every attendee that I had a chance to ask, echoed my assessment.

A question that permeated throughout the conference was how do I take what I learned and implement it in my organization. Most of us know that if you do not start immediately a great deal of information will be lost and eventually little if any will be implemented. My efforts this week will be to assist to make this great learning experience turn into actionable items. If we can do this, you certainly will be assured of coming back next year and I might even get another speaking opportunity.

The problem most people face when coming back from a conference is that they soon get inundated with all their regular work again. It’s not that we don’t want to introduce what we learned but there is so much to do and so little time. As part of my presentation, I discussed the aspect of Standard Work. Standard Work can be simply stated as an outline on the way you do things. It is very similar to determining a budget. A budget does not save you money it just allows you to see where the money is going. It allows you to make choices. Standard Work does the same thing. It allows you to make choices. So, the first step is to accept that we will continue to do our Standard Work but have the ability to make choices to implement something new and to allocate time and a budget if necessary to the initiative.

My preferred method of learning is utilizing an A3. If you missed Claude Perrone, the Agile Sensei talk on A3s, I have included a link to a blog post that discusses A3s, Why A3, Why Now in Lean Thinking? Utilizing an A3 will give a structured format for putting your thoughts together and outlining a course of action. Download an outline of a Problem Solving A3.

The work on the A3 should have started before you went to the conference with an outline of the purpose for going and the expectations from both a personal and an organizational perspective. If you did not do that, you can do it in retrospective.

Next determine what you learned from the conference. If you went as a group, I would encourage the entire group to be present for this step. Outline all the different thoughts and how they may apply to you organization.

Can any of these thoughts be completed simply by the stroke of a pen, something that does not require a change in culture? They may be items that are can be taken care of by a simple budget allocation, a new piece of equipment, etc. Separate these thoughts and evaluate them in your next strategic meeting or in the conference overview meeting.

Let’s get back to that cultural part, the difficult part. You have all heard the saying that “Cultural eats Strategy for Lunch.” The first thing you must realize is that you may have come back from the conference with great ideas and breakthrough thoughts. However, there is an existing culture that is going to eat all of them in one big gulp. You may even be the person that swallows the whole thing as you get tied up in all your Standard Work once again. So don’t try to change the org structure or how management thinks. Create a few wins first.

Do you have one takeaway from the conference that you are passionate about? Can you take that passion and demonstrated to the rest of the team? This should be a team exercise, try it out and see what others think.

It is best to take one initiative; one thought (not necessarily the easiest) and focus on this. Ideally, the initiative should be tied to the current strategic direction of the organization. It is your responsibility to clearly define the Why to Leadership. If you cannot, you may want to rethink and choose another initiative. The important thing is to get agreement on one single item. After doing this, set your goal with a measurement and a time. State the current state and the goal (future state) by a certain time.

In addition, you should have the power to spearhead or at a minimum be a significant participant of the implementation. Stay away from discussing the How. The how should be the responsibility of the implementers or the team. Leadership has the power to veto the how. If you are familiar with the Lean term, Catchball, this a good time to play.

I am going to focus my blog on the subject of “Turning your Conference Learning into Action” for the balance of the week. This is an outline of this week’s discussion.

Conference Learning

View more presentations from Business901

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Path to Participation

In Lean Marketing, Service Design and Design Thinking, we typically use the Customer Journey Map to describe the journey of a user through a series of touchpoints. Mapping this in detail and defining the resources, people, budget and marketing collateral to match each of these steps is imperative. After an organization does this and is ready to take a deeper dive one of the tools I like to utilize is what I call the Path to Participation.

I have seen others use the term but I use it in the context of the customer (prospect) engagement and re-engagement process. Rather, than selling features and benefits of your product and hoping to attract prospects, we try to find a path to participate with customers in our product/market segment. The simple fact is the further we are from our customers’ knowledge base the more effort has to be made to create a larger and larger supply of prospects.

You hear a lot of talk about touch points and increased efforts within an organization that I elaborated on in the blog post, If all of us need to be marketers, what’s the framework? These increased touch-points are very relevant in today’s marketing but you need to stop looking at them from your perspective. Have you spent the time investigating your customers’ touch-points? Look at where and how they distribute their knowledge. When you think from the SD-Logic (The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch) perspective of value in use, use the touch-points created by the use of your product, you will extend your conversation and add insights about not only your customer but your product/service.

The Path to Participation starts in one place in a sales and marketing environment and that is in the customers’ playground. If you want to be visible, if you want the opportunity for participation, you literally need to work where the customer works. Find out if you need to interact with them in Social Media, Community Functions, Bid Lettings, etc.? Where are the places that they demonstrate or express a use for your product? These are the places will build relationships and community versus the more traditional methods of cold-calling and advertising

Taking this information and spreading it within your organization will make it easier for customers to go deeper into your organization for knowledge sharing. As a result, it may provide a flood of new ideas for innovation and co-creation opportunities. Even more importantly, it secures a vendor-customer relationship or partnership that is difficult for others to replicate.

This cannot be done unless we take on the role of pupil. Which I have discussed in a few blog posts:

But before you begin teaching the customer what they need to know, start thinking of this process a little differently. Think of it as you being the pupil rather than the teacher. Think about you having that “aha” moment or that moment when you “get it” versus when your customer gets it.

I went on to say:

Instead participate in communities and discussions that highlight your knowledge, developing an ever expanding network of touch points that allow prospects to self-serve information and to locate you. Think of ways for trials or templates of your organizations best practices to be used that will allow prospects to move into a more collaborative arrangement. As this happens, greater human interaction occurs but typically as a result of the customer qualifying themselves.

If you view your sales and marketing from this position it will create vast opportunities not only in sales but throughout the rest of the organization. There is not a stronger differentiator for your company to acquire. A Lean Marketing measurement is how deep and widespread can a customer penetrate your organization.

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The Aroma of a Good Vision

Ari Weinzweig, CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, MI continues to share the "secrets" that have helped take Zingerman's from a 25-seat, 4-person start up to a nationally known, $40,000,000-organization employing over 500 people.

In this Business901 podcast, Ari discusses his latest book A Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to Being a Better Leader. The book includes "Secrets #19-29" of the Zingerman's Experience, including essays on the Energy Crisis in the American Workplace, Servant Leadership, Stewardship, why everyone's a leader, Zingerman's Entrepreneurial Approach to management, and Ari's approach to Anarcho-Capitalism.

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

In the book series, Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, part 1 offered up the "secrets" behind Building a Great Business, and now part 2,  takes a look at the leadership style that has helped make Zingerman's such a special place to work and to eat.  While everything in the book draws on what Ari and others have learned and live at Zingerman's over the three decades since the Deli first opened back in 1982, all of the material is totally applicable to organizations of all sizes and scopes—it is, as Ari says in the introduction, leading towards a new way to work.

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Mastering Positive Change

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

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

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

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

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When Standard Work and Customer Focus comes Together

In next week’s podcast with Steve Bell, the founder of Lean IT Strategies LLC, we discuss more than just Lean IT. We ended up talking (see the excerpt below) through much of the podcast on the context Lean seems to have; the ability to adapt while staying firmly rooted in its principles.

Joe:  Does it help to be practicing Lean in other areas to start practicing lean IT?

Steve Bell:  That's an interesting question. I have a new book coming out here in just a few months. Dan Jones who was co‑author with Jim Womack of Lean Thinking and a couple of other books really has helped define the practice of Lean. He's the forward author for this new book of mine. Dan and I spent quite a bit of time talking about Lean in the context not just of IT but in the context of other industries. What Dan had to say about this was fascinating. He said he's seen, over the last 20 years or so, Lean has moved well beyond manufacturing. It's moved into healthcare and financial services and transportation and retail and distribution. And every time Lean moves into a new area, a new domain, a new industry sector, it manifests slightly differently. The Lean you would see in a hospital looks different in many ways than the Lean you would see in a manufacturing floor or a retail environment.

But when you get right down to it the principles of Lean are the same. It's about collaborative learning. It's about speed. It's about quality. It's about waste reduction. Those basic principles are the same.

What he has concluded and what I have concluded is you need to create a framework for the people who are actually doing the work to come together, figure out what the work is to be done. Where's the value? Where's the waste? And iteratively, through experiments, find ways to do it better and better. Each time you learn. You go through a cycle of learning. You improve the process and at the same time you understand more about the subtleties about the process and that's where the paradox of Lean emerges. As you're standardizing something you're also gaining insights into it which leads to creativity and innovation.

Many people react to standard work thinking that you're just turning people into robots. What you're actually doing is you're helping people, removing the drudgery and the repetitiveness from the work, making the work flow more smoothly and quickly, which frees up peoples valuable time and energy to figure out ways to do the work better and to do new kinds of work.

I think that's the real magic of Lean whether it's in IT or any other industry. When you see a team really get it and start to think and act like a team with a focus on the customer and they own the product, they own the process, they own their relationship with the customer, then the role of management isn't so much a directive role or a controlling role but the role of management is to help remove the obstacles in the teams way. That's when you have high performance, self directing teams that really start to energize the company. When that happens that's where the momentum comes from.

I think Steve nails it in his answer. His reference to when Standard Work and Customer Focus comes together for a team and allows management to work on enabling work for the team versus managing the team is incredibly insightful. This upcoming podcast is one that you do not want to miss.

About Steve: For more than twenty five years, Steve Bell has delivered a balance of Lean, business process improvement, and management consulting services. Steve published Lean Enterprise Systems: Using IT for Continuous Improvement helping to introduce the emerging discipline of Lean IT. Steve and his partner Mike Orzen later published Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation.

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