Using Scenarios for Current Applications

This video does an excellent job of explaining Scenario Planning. The most common application of is for futuristic thinking and considering the different scenarios that may play out. In the video, it will comment on how this method is used in lieu of forecasting or maybe even when Predictive analytics, no longer work (Podcast,  The Power to Predict Who will...).

When you view this video take a different approach. Instead of looking at the limiting perspective of Scenario Planning for the future view it from a perspective of building Customer Scenarios along the Customer Journey. Instead of assuming a customer was going to react a certain way, we match them to the Scenarios that may happen as a result of being in this position.

 

If we view the Customer’s Journey as a Scenario Journey does that cause a different reaction? Would that help us to seek to understand first?

The Power to Predict

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die was called by Tom Peters, “the most readable big data book I’ve come across, By far, great vignettes and stories.“  Author, ERIC SIEGEL, PhD, is the founder of Predictive Analytics World and Executive Editor of the Predictive Analytics Times. Eric makes the how and why of predictive analytics understandable and captivating.

From Eric’s website:

Predictive analytics taps this rich vein of experience, mining it to offer something completely different from standard business reporting and sales forecasting: actionable predictions for each customer. If you predict it, you own it.

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Lean Sales and Marketing: Learn about using CAP-Do

Predictive Analytics book description: This rich, entertaining primer by former Columbia University professor and Predictive Analytics World founder Eric Siegel reveals the power and perils of predictive analytics, showing how predicting human behavior combats financial risk, fortifies healthcare, conquers spam, toughens crime-fighting, and boosts sales.

Progressing to SD-Logic Thinking

Joseph Michelli, author of Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles for Connecting with Your Customers, Your Products and Your People is tomorrow’s podcast guest and like all his books he bases them around five principles. This is Michelli’s second book on Starbucks, the first one was The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary. In the first book, the five principles were…

1. Make It your Own
2. Everything Matters
3. Surprise and Delight
4. Embrace Resistance
5. Leave your Mark

In one of my highest rated blog post, Is Zappos the Next Toyota?, I discussed the The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW. The Zappos principles were…

1. Serve a Perfect Fit—create bedrock company values
2. Make it Effortlessly Swift—deliver a customer experience with ease
3. Step into the Personal—connect with customers authentically
4. S T R E T C H—grow people and products
5. Play to Win—play hard, work harder

The first Starbucks book was written about 10-years ago and the Zappos book two years ago. As you can see, the progression of the principles from a focus on operations to customer experience. In his new book, Leading the Starbucks Way, I asked the author about the new set of five principles.

Joe: In all your books, you frame them in a certain way which I really like. You base them on certain principles that companies can identify with. Could you start out by giving a brief introduction to the principles that you used in Leading the Starbucks Way?

Joseph Michelli: I'll be glad to. I think for me I have to kind of get it in bite size pieces. There is so much information when you're dealing with a company the size of Starbucks. If I can kind of comeback and pull the cameras back a little we can get on that, some of the principles that we talked about in this book are really kind of around focusing on product and making sure you can savor and elevate your product. They have to do with really extend employees so that the love and I know it can be a tricky we can talk about, but the love that you extend is a leader to your employees is something then that moves into the life of the customers.

We are talking about mobilizing the connection in this book. The world has changed, and the notion that people are just going to walk into your store front or on to your page on online business is just not there. You going to have to go out and find where their lives are and mobilized your connection to make sure that you step into that space with them. There really is a principle in the book that really kind of looks at the importance of not just focusing on transaction or the customer relationship of the day, but really extending yourself out in the life of the customers by challenging your legacy, making sure that you have a lasting legacy statement that goes out into the customer’s space.

In the world which we live today there is a need to have a global of a connection with your customers as possible will also maintaining nuance for cultural relevance. So the business principles in the book are specifically dedicated to that and by name….

1. Savor and Elevate
2. Love to be Loved
3. Reach for Common Ground
4. Mobilize the connection
5. Cherish and Challenge your Legacy

The new perspective of these five principles is similar to many of the forward thinking companies today. We have progressed from operational to customer experience to Service Dominant Thinking (SD_Logic). This is where value is co-created. Delivering great experiences requires participation. We must engage our customers so that they are part of that experience and so much so that they may even take responsibility on delivering part of it. It is not a theater anymore. It not actors delivering to the audience, rather the audience and actors have joined together. For example, think about reality shows. Think about customizing your smartphones. It is the personalization of your experience that elevates it, and you savor the moment.

How do you Handle an Impossible Project?

Michael Dobson (@sidewisethinker), author of Project: Impossible – How the Great Leaders of History Identified, Solved and Accomplished the Seemingly Impossible – and How You Can Too! said in the podcast:

Well, to be honest one of the things, if it hasn't happened in your career yet, I'm saying this to the audience. I'm sure you've been there. If you haven't been given a project that is sort of absurdly impossible on the face of it, well, you haven't been around for a very long time. Impossible projects in any field in any discipline, well, this is just one of those little situations in life that sooner or later we are all confronted with for better or worse. Win, lose or draw, we all have to face it.

Listen to the rest of the conversation on impossible projects.

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MICHAEL SINGER DOBSON is a marketing executive, project management consultant and nationally-known speaker. He has been a staff member of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, award-winning game designer, and career counselor in his varied career. My favorite book of Michael’s, out of twenty or so he wrote, is Creative Project Management. You can find Michael on Twitter @sidewisethinker or his main website sidewiseinsights.com

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What are the benefits of BPM?

My podcast guest next week, Theodore Panagacos is a former Management Consultant with Booz & Company and has years of experience helping organizations design and implement business models that improve its service to customers. His book, The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Management: Everything you need to know and how to apply it to your organization has become an Amazon top seller in its category Business Process Management.

I asked in the podcast one of the most basic questions, “What are the benefits of Business Process Management? What do we get out of it?”  Theodore’s answer was simple, to the point and best of all, answered the question.

BPM is all about identifying what you do-do and what you don't do within a business. BPM helps managers identify the day to day activities that the business runs in a visual representation. Having that sort of information allows managers to make more informed decision about again, the day-to-day operation of their business.

When you go down to the improvement level and the actual level analysis level, you can then start looking at time and cost improvements. For example, how many FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) employees are associated with a particular event or task? How long does it take them to execute that task? When you have that insight and information, you can run certain scenarios that allow you to optimize those processes so that your business is running again at optimum efficiency.

You have other potential benefits like ensuring that you adhere to a regulatory compliance. A lot of industries such as the mining industry and even the banking industry, they have tight laws that govern what they can and can't do and more often than not, there are regulatory bodies that govern these laws. They want to know that the bank has their processes documented particularly if you are dealing with sensitive information like people's bank accounts. There are a couple of things here; I mean regulatory, process optimization and manager's insight into how the business is run.

The Truth about Performance

In this enlightening podcast, N. Dean Myer discusses his new book, Internal Market Economics. Don Tapscott said it was “essential reading for executives interested in maximizing shareholder value or in running effective shared-services organizations.” Dean offers a fresh vision of empowered, entrepreneurial organizations, and practical solutions to a host of pressing financial and management challenges.

Dean Meyer is one of the original proponents of running shared-services organizations within companies as businesses within a business, where every managerial group is an entrepreneurship funded to produce products and services for customers. Dean is the author of seven books. He invented FullCost, a business and budget planning process based on an internal product/service costing solution. He researched the science of organizational structure, captured in his Structural Cybernetics framework and reorganization process.

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I first came across Norm several years ago reading two other books,The Building Blocks Approach to Organization Charts and Decentralization: Fantasies, Failings, and Fundamentals. I had re-read them due to my recent foray into those two subjects.  I wanted to corner Dean about his thoughts and he responded by sending me his latest book. I started out the podcast asking about Internal Market Economics and never did get around to the other subjects for 30 minutes. As a result, a second podcast on Decentralization and Organization Structure will take place next week.

Dean’s websites are ndma.com or FullCost at http://ndma.com/resources/fc-.htm.

Culture Change, What we want is ROI

A lot of mutual trust and respect, and that faith has to develop over a period of time. We have to prove that the system is going to yield the kind of culture change results that we're looking for. You don't have too many CEOs that are out there looking for culture change. – David Adams

Below is an excerpt from next week’s Business901 Podcast with David Adams (@commanderadams), the executive director of the Kennametal Center for Operational Excellence. As of this writing there is still time to attend their North American Operational Excellence Summit. It is being held in Latrobe, PA at Saint Vincent College on October 16th this year. This year’s theme is “A Blueprint for Kaizen Culture“ and intends to draw connections between current continuous improvement efforts and the need for a human and operational balance.

David Adams: There has to be some sort of a management system that undergirds the system of tools. It's the management system that's the harder thing to get. You can throw a book about the Toyota management system at a group of people and say, "Go do this." But implementing a management system is like switching from Windows to Mac OS. It's a painful experience. You have to retrain your mind to think about the decisions that you're making, perhaps even down at the values level, if you will.

What does customer‑first focus mean? How does that translate into a daily decision‑making experience whenever problems are occurring in, say, quality or productivity or cost? Which one do I work on first? There're thousands of problems occurring every day. Which one do I work on first? If I'm customer‑first focused? We may address the quality over the cost problem, depending on the severity of it.

Joe:  When you take this on as an organization, there has to be such a leap of faith. It's not quite the blind leading the blind, but you have that feeling, don't you?

David: Absolutely. In your introduction, you mentioned mutual trust and respect. The first thing that has to happen is mutual trust and respect has to develop between the coach, and substitute whatever word you want there. We use the word "coach" the same way people use the word "mentor" or "sensei."

We've been down the road. We've seen the system and the framework implemented in enterprises as far‑ranging as car sales, to automotive or motor manufacturing, to health care settings and hospitals. A large portion of our business right now is in hospitals. Part of that is just developing mutual trust and respect, and it has to be at the highest level of the organization.

A perfect, perfect match for us is whenever a CEO, myself or my colleague coaches, would see eye‑to‑eye. You've heard the phrase or the cliché, "Being like‑minded," and that's essentially what it is. I can work with CEOs that maybe are expressing their management system differently, but if we're like‑minded, then we can begin to have that mutual trust and respect.

It involves the kinds of things that you wouldn't expect, the CEO who calls ‑‑ maybe even the most tactical question that he or she might have ‑‑ they're calling back to say, "How does this work in the system? How does this work in the framework that you're trying to teach us?"

A lot of mutual trust and respect, and that faith has to develop over a period of time. We have to prove that the system is going to yield the kind of culture change results that we're looking for. You don't have too many CEOs that are out there looking for culture change.

They may be mouthing those words and saying, "We want culture change," but truly what they want is a return on their investment and a change on the bottom line. We can get you there, but we can only get you there after you change the culture that undergirds your improvement system.

Opening Appreciative Space Process 1

The energy and creative generated in the Appreciative Inquiry process is shapes the interaction in a dynamic Open Space session where participants generate the agenda for a series of working sessions where concrete actions are identified. This process has been used with small groups to organizations with thousands of members. This is part 1 of the 2-part podcast.

 

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John Steinbach has combined the approaches of Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space into his dynamic and positive Opening Appreciative Space process .This process starts with Appreciative Inquiry; a positive approach to change that can be used by individuals, teams, organizations, and communities.  Through an interview process that focuses on strengths and high-point experiences, Appreciative Inquiry helps participants discover and create a desired future.  This dynamic and uplifting process has been used by Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, not-for-profit organizations, youth groups, world leaders, and communities.

John Steinbach has worked to Open Appreciative Space in a wide variety of organizations including GTE, Verizon, Hughes Electronics, Nationwide Insurance, Boeing, Raytheon, GE, Cardinal Health Systems, United Way, American Red Cross, Purdue Extensions services and dozens of non-profits, churches and youth-serving organizations.

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

Lean and ROWE, Friend or Foe

David Kasprzak, of the popular blog, My Flexible Pencil was interviewed in the Business901 podcast, Does Lean solve some problems for ROWE?. This is a transcription of the podcast.

ROWE stands for  Results-Only Work Environment. It is a revolutionary new way of working that gives employees more responsibility and accountability for their work and the way they do it.  ROWE is the core of the CultureRx philosophy. ROWE is all about results. It’s all you need to increase productivity, engagement, employee retention — AND the bottom line.

More information about Dave and Rowe can be found:
ROWE, Lean and the Shingo Model
“Results Only” means “Value Only”

Related Information:
Does ROWE solve some Lean Problems?
Games maybe your only chance to attract the best and brightest talent,
Can the Lean Knowledge Worker cope with Leader Standard Work?
Developing a winning Culture the Zappos way!

Become a Learning Organization through Relentless Reflection

Hoshin Kanri is a management system that creates a method of policy deployment in the form of both organizational and employees goals. It is a step by step implementation and review process from a systems approach perspective for change. In the simplest form, top management sets a vision and bottom line employee sets the tactics. In the middle, there is a lot of give and take and coordination through the use of a term catchball that results in:

• Prioritizing activities and resources
• Organizational involvement from top to bottom clarify their own target and activities
• Utilizing PDCA in both the management and employee cycles of improvement

The difference in Hoshin planning is that we do not accept the current situation but seek to aspire to something greater. However, we seek solutions between the current and aspired state by bridging the gap through the process of Kanri the other part of the process. Kanri is defined as a method to efficiently achieve purposes through PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act).

What makes Hoshin different than just your typical continuous improvement is that we are not solving the typical workplace problem but rather the value-added problems based on top management thinking (Vision and Targets). The “Hoshin” is developed at each layer of management clarifying strategies and targets to assist in reaching the preceding layer’s targets. This results in both a macro and micro PDCA. This greatly increases the line of sight and shared responsibility to each other in achieving these goals.

The workplace mission is defined within Toyota from the question “For whom and what type of value added products and services should be provided?” In this way, measures are created from the value added problems determined in the Hoshin process. Breaking the annual strategy down to what I call “Doable Chunks” is one of the secrets to Hoshin Kanri’s success.

It is not only the task but the team size that will assist in a positive outcome. Jeff Bezo’s of Amazon fame always used what he called the two pizza rule. If you needed more than two pizzas to feed the group, the group was too big. Smaller groups promote: informal communication, better assignment of tasks, more manageable task, increase participation, reduces information needed to be processed and most importantly – A CLEAR LINE OF SIGHT.

The approaches of Hoshin Kanri and Leader Standard Work seem to have a common thread in them. It is one of shared work and responsibilities and as a result regular feedback or reflection. It makes the management process continuous over something more formal such as a review.

P.S. The Business901 podcast tomorrow features lifetime Lean Learner Anthony Manzos of Profero, Inc. and 5S Supply. Our conversation centered on Hoshin Kanri.

Related Information:
Finding your Vision, It may be as simple as Tapping your Shoes
PDCA Cycle of Zingerman’s Deli
Connecting Continuous Improvement and Appreciative Inquiry
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
What’s new in Business Model Generation? Customer Value Canvas and more

3 Tips on achieving Fast, Effective, Sustainable change

Next weeks Business901 podcast guest is Sara Lewis, the Managing Director of Appreciating Change, a psychological change consultancy focused on helping leaders and managers achieve positive change in their organizations. 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 excerpt from the podcast:

Joe:  If you had three pieces of advice for leaders for achieving fast, effective, sustainable change what would they be?

Sarah:  “I think one would be you don't have to do it all alone. Draw on the collective intelligence of your organization. They want to survive as much as you do, they want to help. There may be some issues in the way they've been treated in the past but it's as important to them as it is to you that this organization continues to do well. One would be don't feel you have to do it all alone. The second would be, humans have evolved in such a way that they need more carrot than stick to be at their best. Because we over‑weigh negative things and under‑weigh positive things, we actually need three times as many good experiences as negative experiences to start to enter the enchanted place of creativity, connectivity, generativity, synchronicity and all the good things that help organizations to move much faster and much more efficiently.

Yes, you need to obviously keep a minimum line on things. But what most organizations need a lot more of is the good stuff pumped into them, so that positivity thing.

I think the third piece of advice, which is a much more generic one, is it's becoming increasingly clear that the leaders who are able to have the most positive impact in their organizations, whatever their style may be, the key thing is this thing about authentic leadership. Part of authentic leadership is being open and transparent in ‑‑ that's the other thing ‑‑ a managed way.

I remember some of the London Business School people said that after all their analysis, the art of leadership boiled downed to five words, which was, "Be yourself more with skill." All of those words are important.

So things like doing difficult things and asking for forgiveness, being humble about the fact that this is not doing it on your own. Everybody here has contributed to what we've achieved this year. Those old‑fashioned in a way is being grateful.

Everybody who comes to your organization helps to create it, does something that moves it forward. There's something about allowing that side of yourself to come through to people, because people do respond and emotions are very contagious, virtuous circles.

If we see people being heroic, we're more inclined to be a little bit more heroic ourselves the next time the opportunity arises. If someone is helpful, we see someone being helpful or someone is helpful to us, we're more likely to do it to somebody else.

You can set off these virtuous circles of very positive interactions, which just have not escalating, but the virtuous circle gets bigger and bigger benefits in terms of performance and productivity in the end.”

Related Information:
Getting Resistance to Appreciative Inquiry?
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving
The Difference In Lean Problem Solving for Sales and Marketing

Finding your Vision, It may be as simple as Tapping your Shoes

There are several purposes to the Balance Scorecard. One of the most important is to create measures that are forward looking and proactive. This way the Balanced Scorecard can be an effective agent of organizational change. However, we can never start any forward thinking without a vision.

I use to think that Vision and Mission Statements were a consultant/academic type exercise. I did them but I have to honestly admit, it may have been more of an exercise than a real vision. In recent years, working with such a variety of companies, I have shifted my thinking. Without vision, you seldom provide a unifying theme of purpose. All of your objectives, all the measures, all the targets, etc. become disjointed. In a recent interview for a future Business901 Podcast, Ari Weinzweig, CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, MI said, “Vision comes from the heart”. That statement sums it up perfectly.

Recently, I have participated with organizations using Hoshin Kanri and the Balanced Scorecard. These approaches have a remarkable similarity and both are driven by the vision and strategic goals of the organization. These approaches will highlight a lack of vision. You will find great difficulty in completing the process without a crystal clear view of where you want to go. It’s that Why, Simon Sinek explains in his book, Start with Why.

Whether you call it Why or Vision, there is not anything else more instrumental to your success. Do you believe your organization has a heart? Does that mission pulsate throughout the entire organization? It’s not an iterative process. It is not anything that is cloudy or mysterious to your organization. It is Why you get up in the morning and go to work. With Vision, With Why, a unifying theme of purpose exists. All of your objectives, all the measures, all the targets, etc. become aligned.

It’s very similar to Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz! She was running away from home for a better life. They did not understand her. She lacked a vision. Linda, the good witch came back and told Dorothy, “You have had the power all along; you just had to find it.” I encourage you as a business to find your vision and identify with it. Tap those shoes together: Find the Vision, the Why of your organization.

P.S. How long should you plan for? I think vision is something that will extend many years out and would venture to say for even young companies that 5 years is a minimum period. Most mature companies should paint a vision and strategic direction for at least a 10 year period.

Related Information:
Is the Balance Scorecard being revived?
Driving Profit through People and Processes
PDCA Cycle of Zingerman’s Deli
It’s the Who, not the Why @simonsinek

How do you handle inputs into your life? Do you process them effectively and efficiently?

The book A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance demonstrates how to apply lean principles to the individual.  It delivers key concepts such as visual management, flow, pull, and 5S. Dan provides these concepts to the individual results in the same kind of benefits: greater efficiency, less waste, and improved focus on customer value. The author, Dan Markovitz is the founder and owner of TimeBack Management, a consultancy specializing in improving individual and organizational performance through the application of lean concepts.

These concepts will be very familiar to people knowledgeable with continuous improvement and more specifically Lean and Six Sigma. However, you do not have to be a practitioner to understand or read the book. When trade terms are used the authors explains them in simple everyday language without losing a beat. Few people other than Dan could have provided a book of this sort. His experience with Lean coupled with many years of providing guidance on individual performance has given him profound insight. There may be others with his depth of knowledge but few that can transfer it into simple, practical and useable information. I found myself reading a “how to” book like a novel. I had to remind myself more than once to bend a corner or mark a page for future reference.

Dan is also not shy about crediting or highlighting others when it fits the application. He spends time discussing Personal Kanban and how he looks at applying it. My favorite part of the book was the part on living in your calendar versus your inbox. That comment in itself added a few more minutes of productivity to my day. His A3, Value Map and Information 5S were absolutely flawless.

Are you going to get 2 hours a day of time saving tips from the book? I doubt it. What you will get is more productivity and feeling better about what and how you accomplished it. It was my New Year’s Day read and I have picked it up every day since then. Not saying you won’t be able to put it down but at this point it looks that way for me.

Related Information:
The SDCA Cycle Description for a Lean Engagement Team
The Resilience of PDCA
Lean Canvas for Lean EDCA-PDCA-SDCA
Successful Lean teams are iTeams

Timeboxing using Pomodoro!

The quickest drivers of time management is visualization, focus and clarity. What I talked about the other day is to have an action step with your reference material in hand, Evolution of Standard Work in my Sales and Marketing and Even Seinfeld used Standard Work. Be able to complete the task without having to look for anything. This will help both clarity and from the visual aspect since the supporting material is right there. Amazing how you can just reach for something and get side tracked sometimes.

The other area that is neglected is focus. So how do you focus? There are 2 areas external distraction and internal – self-inflicted. In your home office, make sure there is a door. Open means you can be disturbed and closed means you can’t. You want to focus – close the door! Don’t have your e-mail or Skype pop up if it distracts you. Give yourself 10 minutes an hour, every two hours or something that you do that. Leave other members on the team know that you check and accept messages at the top of the hour for 5 minutes during your time zone of focus.

From Wikpedia:

When I want to get a task done, I use The Pomodora Technique . A time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. This technique uses a timer to break down periods of work into 25-minute intervals called 'Pomodoros' (from the Italian word for 'tomatoes') separated by breaks. Closely related to concepts such as timeboxing and iterative and incremental development used in software design, the method has been adopted in pair programming contexts. The method is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility.

There are five basic steps to implementing the technique:

1. Decide on the task to be done
2. Set the pomodoro (timer) to 25 minutes (I use a tomato timer by the way)
3. Work on the task until the timer rings; record with an x
4. Take a short break (5 minutes)
5. Every four "pomodoros" take a longer break (15–20 minutes)

The above is the technique as described in literature. You may find a slightly different time works for you but the secret is to go full bore –a sprint than take a break. The reverse analogy of the tortoise and the hare.  It actually works very well. Try doing it for a call session of two hours broken into 4 pomodoros. But make sure you don’t have to get up to reach or touch anything during that time. Let team members know that if they want to call you do so at the top of the hour. You may have to lengthen the break for 10 minutes or to handle outside distractions. But it is important that you do the sprint.

I actually use this technique in writing all the time. The first 15 minutes I just force myself to write and don’t stop. I stop for a minute and start again. If I slow up I just press the space bar at  a slower rate. I do this twice equaling 30 minutes. The next 30 minutes after a break I edit what I wrote. Then I go back and start over. I repeat this over and over.  I will typically edit it one or two times more but you get my drift. A great book on the subject of overcoming writer’s block is Accidental Genius. A mind map is located on the Business901 Mindmap page.

Related Book: Pomodoro Technique Illustrated

Related Information:
Kanban too simple To be Effective?
The importance of PDCA in Marketing
Even Seinfeld used Standard Work
The SDCA Cycle Description for a Lean Engagement Team

Customer Experience more powerful than the Supply Chain?

During the past few months I have been spending time understanding the Service Design concept. The history according to Wikpedia:

The earliest contributions on service design (Shostack 1982; Shostack 1984), the activity of designing service was considered as part of the domain of marketing and management disciplines. This design process, according to Shostack, can be documented and codified using a “service blueprint” to map the sequence of events in a service and its essential functions in an objective and explicit manner.

In 1991, service design was first introduced as a design discipline by Prof. Dr. Michael Erlhoff at Köln International School of Design (KISD), and Prof. Birgit Mager has played an integral role for developing the study of service design at KISD in later days. In 2010, 23 service design professionals published the first comprehensive textbook This is Service Design Thinking: Basics - Tools - Cases , edited by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider.

Wikpedia goes on the give a brief description of Service Design:

Together with the most traditional methods used for product design, service design requires methods and tools to control new elements of the design process, such as the time and the interaction between actors. An overview of the methodologies for designing services is proposed by (Morelli 2006), who proposes three main directions:

1. Identification of the actors involved in the definition of the service, using appropriate analytical tools
2. Definition of possible service scenarios, verifying use cases, sequences of actions and actors’ role, in order to define the requirements for the service and its logical and organizational structure
3. Representation of the service, using techniques that illustrate all the components of the service, including physical elements, interactions, logical links and temporal sequences

Where Service Design has made an impact in my thinking though is its obvious connection to two areas. One in the ability to involve customers through co-creation or open innovation and the other as it relates to The Experience Economy popularized by the book of that name by Pine and Gilmore.

In the 90’s business processes was all the buzz and Lean, Six Sigma led the way. They have continued gaining popularity but and this is a big “but” may soon lose out to the methodologies of Service Design and Design Thinking.

Why? Lean and Six Sigma cannot move away from that supply chain mentality. They are continuously bogged down in the internal world of product delivery. They continue to think the more efficient you become the better company you become. They relate everything to customer value but seldom is that referenced to an external customer.

What’s different about Service Design? In the Service Design context they put the customer experience at the center of the organization. Many product companies have been using this concept with Apple being the shining example. Design is the differentiating factor.

When viewing the customer experience perspective from The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing framework that states, value is not created till your product/service is put into use creates a different spin. It obsoletes the supply chain and operational excellence as the primary reason your product is purchased. Many efficiency experts are simply at a loss to explain this and struggle to comprehend this concept.

I am not saying improvement of a process is not a good thing. But to do it without improving the customer experience will provide little value and may even prove to be “invaluable”. More information on this can be obtained in a recent blog post: Will Lean always internalize the customer?

Related Information:
The Service-dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate, And Directions
If all of us need to be marketers, what’s the framework?
7 Principles of Universal Design & Beyond
The Common Thread of Design Thinking, Service Design and Lean Marketing

Mindmap on the 4 Obsessions of Extraordinary Executive

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

This Mindmap was constructed during the listening of the book, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: A Leadership Fable where the author explains how healthy companies can make themselves smarter, but unhealthy organizations squander intellectual advantage through infighting and cross-purposes.

Related Information:
Virtual Organizations will change the Org chart
Allowing Individual Kaizen is Essentially Respect for People.
Continuous Improvement Sales and Marketing Toolset
Best way to prototype your Value Proposition

Empower yourself before the Team

Razi Imam is an accomplished award winning innovator, entrepreneur, and author. He has experience and knowledge of successfully innovating products and services, launching them in competitive markets, and building world-class high-performance teams.

Razi;s new book Driven: A How-to Strategy for Unlocking Your Greatest Potential is discussed in the podcast and you are introduced to a powerful motivational philosophy. I think you will find the podcast a little different than most of mine as we discuss self and team development. Razi is an excellent and captivating speaker. 

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

Razi is the founder of a fast growing software company called Landslide Technologies that is receiving rave reviews from customers, analysts and press. His company has been named 'visionary' three years in row by the leading analyst firm - The Gartner Group. He has also recently founded 113 Industries, an industry-driven business incubator focusing on advanced materials. The goal of this incubator is to help breakthrough discoveries in advanced materials coming from our universities, and government labs become viable commercial products.

Related Information:
What will your workplace be like in 2020?
Change Education, Change the Sales Cycle
The Different Levels of Kaizen
Transforming Ordinary Teams to Extraordinary

Four Star General on Leadership–Listen, Learn…

Four-star general Stanley McChrystal shares what he learned about leadership over his decades in the military. How can you build a sense of shared purpose among people of many ages and skill sets? By listening and learning -- and addressing the possibility of failure.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.

Related Information:
Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA
Should you Manage your Organization with Agile Techniques?
Your Value Network Participants; Who are they?
What you can Learn from the Military on Cadence

Using Agile in Management

This is a transcription of the Business901 Podcast, Should you Manage your Organization with Agile Techniques?. My guest was Steve Denning’s, author of the new book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century (Jossey-Bass, 2010).

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe:  Software is more of a knowledge field. And you can understand, because to iterate knowledge is pretty easy. Can you really take it into a broader perspective into an organization?

Stephen:  Well, I would say most work has become knowledge work. There are a few little areas where it isn't the case. But I mean, 100 years ago, most work was semi‑skilled work, but basically, you walk into any organization today, most of the work involves knowledge work and even work which doesn't appear to be knowledge work. In fact, the challenge for management is, "How do we turn that into knowledge work?" How do we take the routine parts of that and have it done by machines or computers? And how do we apply the brains and the talent and the energies and the ingenuity and the creativity in these people so that they can make a real contribution to the work?

So overall, I mean, a huge proportion of the work is already knowledge work, and the challenge is to make all of it knowledge work. So this software, in a sense, is pure knowledge work. And it is no surprise then that this would be the area where this emerged most fully because in this area, if you don't manage knowledge work effectively, then nothing happens.

Agile Techniques in Management

Steve is also the author of the award-winning books, The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership) and The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative. Steve works with organizations in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia on leadership, innovation, business narrative and reinventing management. From 1996 to 2000, Steve was the Program Director, Knowledge Management at the World Bank.

Stephen Denning’s website: http://stevedenning.com 

Related Posts:
Lean Marketing Creates Knowledge for the Customer
Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing …
The differences in Lean and Agile
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
Pull: The Pull in Lean Marketing
Lean Marketers should read Radical Management