Lean Sales and Marketing thru Service Design Thinking » Kaizen

Individual Lean, the Root Cause of Success?

business901 — Tue, 15 May 2012 02:35:00 +0000

Can the principles of Lean be applied to your daily life? Dan Markovitz, founder and owner of TimeBack Management certainly thinks so. He has developed a consultancy specializing in improving individual and organizational performance through the application of lean concepts. Dan has backed up his claim in his latest book, A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance. Dan feels Lean can be just as powerful for yourself as it for organizations.

After talking to Dan, I reviewed the 5 basic principles of Lean:

Identify Value
Map Value Stream
Create Flow
Establish Pull
Seek Perfection

I certainly found an interesting relation to how I apply them from an organizational standpoint and how I could use them to improve my day. Dan gave a few tips and encouraged me to find the root cause of several of my most nagging problems. I can’t say the choices were easy but I was certainly able to address them and make decisions accordingly. Now, if I can only sustain it!!!

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

I reviewed the book in this blog post: How do you handle inputs into your life? and there is a written excerpt from the podcast, Can you Lean yourself?.

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Can you Lean yourself?

business901 — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:32:00 +0000

In a past blog post, How do you handle inputs into your life?, I discussed the book A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance. Next week’s Business901 Podcast features the author, Dan Markovitz, founder and owner of TimeBack Management. Timeback is a consultancy specializing in improving individual and organizational performance through the application of lean concepts.

This is an excerpt from the podcast:

Joe: If you really sit back and take a look at what you are doing or have to do, that you have much more control over the situation than you think. Applying the Pareto Principle, you have a lot of control?.

Dan: “I think often we do. I think oftentimes there is a lot more room for improvement than we realize. We just haven’t bothered looking. We just say, “Oh yeah, I get interrupted all the time.” “Oh yeah, I get these problems.” But we don’t really understand why because we’ve never stopped to really grasp the situation. The other thing, where I think Lean is really important, comes in the notion of visual management. I hear people saying all the time, “You know, I feel like I’m always reactive. I’m not proactive. I’m always being tactical. I can never be strategic.”

They cite the same thing that you talked about ? an email comes in that’s kind of important or my boss comes in and says, “We have to do X, Y, and Z.” I think what I see is that because we are knowledge workers our work tends to be invisible. It tends to reside in bits and bytes of electrons of data sitting in our email inbox, sitting in a document somewhere on our computer desktop, whatever.

But it’s not real visible. It’s not like an engine assembly in front of you. It’s not like a fan blade that you’re working on in front of you. As a consequence what happens is that it’s very easy to pull my attention away from what I’m working on.

I think visual management, the notion of taking the work that you’re doing and somehow making it more visible, making it more visual, enables us to better judge whether we should be responding to this new problem rather than the thing that we were working on.

So again, the simple example, Joe, would be, I am working on something and then an email comes in, and I look at it and I say, “Oh, boy. I’m going to handle this,” and I get distracted by that.

The problem is I don’t know what I’m supposed to be working on. Because my work is relatively invisible, I don’t really have the ability to say which is truly more important, this new thing that came in or this old thing that I was supposed to be working on.

And so what happens is we’re always distracted by the squeaky wheel and we start giving it the oil or the grease, instead of saying, “Gosh, this wheel maybe squeaking, but I’ve got much bigger issues to take care of.”

I think ideas that you see in something like Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban, that’s one way of making the work visible. You’ve got the physical representation of it on a white board and now you can say, “These are the three things that I am working on now. This is my work in progress. Oops. Here comes something new. Well, is it more important than these three things, yes or no?” If the answer is yes, well then, great, change. If the answer is no, well then, figure out how you are going to handle it.

Stick with what you are doing and then figure out how you are going to cue up that new thing, or hand it off to someone else or ignore it or whatever.”

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Kaizen is Always Individual

business901 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 03:35:00 +0000

Last spring, Dr Balle the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute and I had a conversation on Kaizen which resulted in an 8-week series of videos and a podcast. This is a 34 page transcription of the discussion. I think you will find it entertaining and will provide a different way of viewing continuous improvement and Kaizen.

An excerpt from the transcription:

Joe: Michael, when you talk about Kaizen, you talk about Kaizen on an individual basis. Can you explain that?

Michael Balle: Absolutely. Kaizen is always individual. There’s a difference in perspective, and we’re very biased by our Taylorist pasts. Our understanding we usually have is that performance is the result of processes. We all buy that, and its fine. Our thinking is that if you hit each of these processes with an improvement project, and people call it Kaizen but it’s not, then the results should be improved performance.

Evidence over the past 20 years has shown that this is not the case. What you do have is quick hits. You can have some savings, or you have some low?hanging fruit, but you don’t have the improvement we’re looking for.

The other way of looking at this is that any process is just a collection of individuals. If each individual is better at their job, then collectively they will come up with a process that performs better and delivers in performance. I think this is the key to understanding. Kaizen is an individual activity to make you better at your job. This is something we see with Lean students.

After studying Lean for a while, you ask them the question, “Do you feel you’re mastering Lean better?” and they say, “Well, no. The system, it seems still as mysterious and deep and hard to master.” You ask them the second question, “Are you better at your jobs? Do you feel you’re better at your jobs?” They say, “No debate, Absolutely, yes.” They’re confident that they’re a lot better at their jobs. This is what Kaizen is about.

Kaizen is about improving you, Joe. By doing Kaizen, you will improve how you see your job and how you perform at your job. This will make you stop making some classic mistakes, for this will also make you discover innovative ways of doing your job.

As we all pull together with a deeper understanding of our jobs, we create processes that our competitors can never touch. In order to hold those better processes, each of us has to be better at our jobs.

Dr. Balle went on to say:

Really, the essence of Kaizen is building people an understanding, a vision, of the waste their technical choices imposes on the work chain. It is an individual thing as it is their technical choices and it is a collective thing as it’s not the waste they impose on themselves but the waste they impose on their suppliers, the waste they impose on their internal customers.

This conversation was one of the reasons I delayed publishing the Lean Engagement Team and more specifically the chapter on the iCustomer and iTeam. It did not change my thinking of teamwork and individual responsibility but it did re-frame the way I viewed and described those two subjects. The book is available as a PDF download on the Business901.com website or on Amazon:
Lean Engagement Team (Marketing with Lean, Volume 2) [Ring-bound]
Lean Engagement Team (Marketing with Lean, Volume 2) [CD-ROM]

The Kaizen Series
Dr. Balle Friday Video Series
Audio Collection of Dr. Balle on Kaizen

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Successful Lean teams are iTeams

business901 — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 05:21:01 +0000

When I use this term, it is based on a simple theory that Teamwork Is an Individual Skill. In this book by Christopher Avery he describes a team as a group of individuals responding successfully to the opportunity presented by shared responsibility.

Paraphrased from the book:

Your ability to create high quality, productive relationships is fast becoming the most important factor in getting your work done. It once was management’s job to hand out individual jobs and then integrate them. Now, organizations are giving the work to teams in larger chinks and expecting teams to divide the work in an effective and efficient manner.

In Lean Engagement Teams the individual must come first and the reason there must be an I at the beginning of team, hence the iTeam.

Avery goes on to state:

Every individual at work can be far more productive if they will take complete responsibility for the quality and productivity of each team or relationship of which they are part of. It means that..
You may have individual accountabilities, but accomplishing these will almost always depend on successful relationships with others and their work.
You can better attend to you own accountabilities when you assume responsibility for a larger, share task or deliverable.
You success depends on teams. Teamwork is an individual – not –group – skill and should be treated as such.
Individuals make a huge difference in teams, for better or worse. You can easily earn what kind of difference you make and how to build and rebuild a team.

The team concept in Lean thinking is very much individual driven. The individuals that form the team are the reason for the failures and the successes. Dr, Michael Balle and I discussed Individual Kaizen in this video:

No team in Kaizen

View more videos from Business901

As we start engaging our customers in the spirit of collaboration, co-producing and co-creation we must remember that are internal actions will mimic our external actions. The importance of the iTeam will become intensified and transparent in all of our external engagements. We must be willing to accept that as individuals and organizations as we move forward.

Are you willing to take that challenge?

A similar blog that was published after I had written this one: There IS an “I” in Team

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Lean Sales and Marketing and the iCustomer

business901 — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 04:25:20 +0000

One of the main reasons that I have attached marketing to the Lean methodology is the simple approach that is used and termed “Learn by Doing.” The Toyota Production System is known for Kaizen/PDCA that is explicitly built upon learning-by-doing effects.

Kaizen is a daily process, the purpose of which goes beyond simple productivity improvement. It is a process that, when done correctly, humanizes the workplace, eliminates overly hard work, and teaches people how to perform experiments on their work using the scientific method – Wikpedia.

The use of “Learn by Doing” techniques is what drives my adaption of Lean in the Sales and Marketing efforts. The basic premise of marketing today has become the interaction with the customer; the more humanistic, the better. Learn by Doing technique simply breaks the marketing process down into a series of validating loops with the customer.

If there is only one thing that you take away from the Lean Startup movement, it is the message that is sent about getting out of the office and validating whatever you are working on with the customer. It is a similar principle that is reinforced in Service Design and Design Thinking processes.

Going back to the The Lean Startup, an important lesson you can learn from this concept is not even in the book. Author Eric Ries sold the Lean Startup through Meetups, Lean Startup Sessions around the globe and later his own conferences. Secondly, he leveraged everything with the brilliant use of social media. However it was all high touch, low technology from a person that grew up in the software community. Even the Build, Measure and Learn adaption of PDCA is highly structured around gaining customer acceptance and validation; again, high touch.

No matter, what brilliant marketing efforts you may create or how automated your marketing funnel may become, it will fail against authentic and human touch. I think this customer interaction is the most important marketing tool you can have. I will term this customer interaction: the iCustomer.

In Lean Sales and Marketing the “Learn by Doing” concept is the iCustomer. It is not about sending another email, it is about the iCustomer. It is not another Voice Shout or tweet or even blog post, it is the iCustomer. If you want to know how effective your marketing efforts are? Measure how many iCustomers it creates. You have only one customer, the person that buys and uses your product. This is the person you must learn from. “Learn by Doing” must be done at the iCustomer.

Marketing and medicine seem to be relying more and more on technology. This Ted video demonstrates some strikingly parallel concepts to marketing. See how modern medicine is in danger of losing a powerful, old-fashioned tool: human touch. Physician and writer Abraham Verghese describes our strange new world where patients are merely data points, and calls for a return to the traditional one-on-one physical exam.

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Is Continuous Improvement Continuous?

business901 — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 03:25:00 +0000

In the LinkedIn, Association for Manufacturing Excellence Group there has been a discussion started about this presentation where they suggest that a standard is more like a target condition, and that the only way to maintain gains is to keep improvement moving forward. Their thoughts, hence the slideshow is that PDCA is better served by retiring the Wedge practice of standardizing to hold the gains in place.

Retire the PDCA wedge

View more presentations from Association for Manufacturing Excellence

My question though is continuous improvement really continuous? I found as a trainer that it was important to stop and take a breath. I never used the incline and the wedge but a staircase approach sometimes even with landings. Having that dwell time for everyone to catch up and before moving on was always important not only for the team (group) but for me as a trainer to evaluate things. It was also a good time to celebrate along the way.

An example is the Toyota Supplier hierarchy depicted by Liker and Meier in the (The Toyota Way Fieldbook. Viewing the stages such as described in the blog post, The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota we would see a natural progression through the stages of the supplier. A supplier starts working with Toyota at the stage of developing Mutual Understanding. They base this on the key elements of Trust, Mutual prosperity, Respect for People and Genchi gembutsu (actual part, actual place). It ultimately ends in Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) and Learning through PDCA. I am leaving out a significant portion of development in the five other steps but it suffices to say that there is a continued progression through the stages based on an increase of knowledge and sharing between the two parties.

I adhere to the Toyota principle of setting audacious goals and striving for them. Becoming a top supplier as depicted in the Supplier hierarchy is one. I try to do this with showing a large PDCA as my overall vision and incorporating the staircase. The individual steps of the staircase are just an individual mini-pdca. We could go into a greater discussion of Hoshin, Lean Culture and transformation but I like to keep things pretty simple. So, I simply view PDCA or continuous improvement as the culture of Lean. Is my reasoning in line with the “new thoughts” or am I stuck in the mud with a wedge holding me in place?

I encourage you to join the conversation at this LinkedIn group: Association for Manufacturing Excellence Group! The authors of the presentation will be making presentations about the improvement kata at the upcoming AME Conference in Dallas. Conference information: http://bit.ly/pgeszj

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When Lean Thinking is not enough!

business901 — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 05:45:47 +0000

When are Lean Thinking, A3 Problem Solving, PDCA, Kaizen and Continuous Improvement not enough? There is actually a time when considering small incremental improvements are the wrong thing to do.

When you are dealing with a high degree of uncertainty, there still needs to be a process in place. If not, you may end up fighting the process versus working on the problem. I am not sure where I heard this but it is worth repeating here: “How many good ideas have you lost because of a poor plan?”

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) tries to solve some of these problems but it is a fairly laborious process for the most of us. I came across a book by Tim Hurson recently, Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking that I thought was well written and the examples in it make implementing the process described quite simple.

I created a quick PowerPoint to walk someone through the process.

When Lean Thinking is Not Enough!

View more presentations from Business901

An excerpt from an Amazon review:

I’ll admit to being a bit jaded, and the first few sections of the book offer more of a history lesson about innovation and innovative thinking than I felt necessary, but for those approaching the topic for the first time, the concepts of the monkey mind and gator brain are compelling, since they demonstrate that our current methods of thinking avoid risk and most often simply react to threats or patterns. The book starts to get really interesting in the fourth chapter, which deals with resisting the urge to quickly arrive at an answer. Instead, the book encourages us to "Stay with the Question". In his approach, Hurson sucks us in, peeling the onion a little at a time and getting agreement, till we are in violent agreement that we must change drastically. Then he rolls out section three of his book, which outlines a process for creative and innovative thinking, supported by a number of simple but powerful tools.

The phases describe a method to generate better ideas, use some divergent then convergent thinking to stretch them, then move on to evaluate and determine which ideas should be considered for evaluation. What I also like is that he adds a step for deciding actions and assigning resources. Too often we get excited about selecting ideas for further investigation without determining and identifying the resources and plans necessary for the critical next steps. Along this process he introduces a number of tools: the I-cube or the C-5 or the DRIVE model, all of which are relatively easy to use and bring shape and focus around thinking and decision making that traditionally has been very subjective.

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Mind Map on the 4 Obsessions of Extraordinary Executive

business901 — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:15:00 +0000

This is part 1 of a 5 part afternoon series depicting the mind maps that I have created on the books of Patrick Lencioni. His website and company, The Table Group offers additional information on these subjects.

This mind map 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.

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Audio Collection of Dr. Balle on Kaizen

business901 — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 04:15:00 +0000

The Friday Video Series with Dr. Michael Balle, the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute recently competed a two month long series on Kaizen. I have included the entire audio of the conversation as a podcast. Even if you have watched the videos I think you will find it worthwhile.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Dr. Balle on Kaizen or go to the Business901 iTunes Store

Dr. Balle is a multiple Shingo Prize winner as an author of the The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager. His newest Shingo Prize was on the adaption of The Gold Mine: A Novel of Lean Turnaround to an audiobook that features performances by multiple readers who bring its realistic business story and characters to life.

Dr. Michael Balle is the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute

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Individual Kaizen and handling blame!

business901 — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 02:29:00 +0000

Individual Kaizen is very powerful when you can let go of assigning blame. This is part of the Business901 video Series with Dr. Michael Balle, the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute. This series of videos continues with a central theme of Kaizen.

Dr. Michael Balle is the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute

Past Videos with Dr. Balle on the Biz901 You Tube Channel

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Are Kaizen Events against the principles of Kaizen?

business901 — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 02:29:00 +0000

Part of the Business901 video Series with Dr. Michael Balle, the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute, this particular video centers on why would you use Kaizen Events? Is a Kaizen Event against the principles of Kaizen? This series of videos has a central theme of Kaizen.

Dr. Michael Balle is the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute

Past Videos with Dr. Balle on the Biz901 You Tube Channel

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Allowing Individual Kaizen is Essentially Respect for People.

business901 — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:02:00 +0000

The Friday Video Series continues with Dr. Michael Balle, the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute. This series of videos continues with a central theme of Kaizen. In the beginning of the video we discuss several resources to learn more about individual Kaizen and in the last 2 minutes discuss how Kaizen plays a role in respect.

Dr. Michael Balle is the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute

Past Videos with Dr. Balle on the Biz901 You Tube Channel

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Is PDCA the culture of Lean?

business901 — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 04:13:21 +0000

I have always considered PDCA as the culture of Lean. I get frustrated when I hear about Lean only discussed in terms of flow and waste reduction. In a recent Business901 Podcast, Gemba Coach talks PDCA, Dr. Michael Balle and myself had a discussion on this subject. This is a transcription of the podcast.

Gemba Coach talks PDCA

View more documents from Joseph Dager.

Dr. Michael Balle is the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute

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Individual Kaizen, Putting yourself first!

business901 — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 02:34:00 +0000

Individual Kaizen will make you better today and as a result opens doors tomorrow! Learn how by practicing 3 things to do in your individual life! The Friday Video Series continues with Dr. Michael Balle, the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute. This series of videos continues with a central theme of Kaizen.

The video stops a little short at the end. Don’t be alarmed!

Dr. Michael Balle is the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute

Past Videos with Dr. Balle on the Biz901 You Tube Channel

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