A Gemba Talk on Lean with Womack

I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Womack about his new book Gemba Walks and solicited many of his opinions about business and Lean. It ended up being a 2-part podcast and the transcription below turned into a 46 page mini-book. I actually enjoyed the transcription better than the podcast. Even I could sell this Read More …

SALES PDCA Framework for Lean Sales and Marketing

SALES PDCA is the framework I use for the process that takes place in the customer groups. It is nothing more than a standard PDCA cycle except the SALES part of the framework is where the sales team gets its directions and coaching from the team coordinator and value stream manager. Within the actual PDCA Read More …

Little Bets – The Way to take an Affordable Risk

Start Small, Iterate a lot, Scale – that’s the advice from Peter Sims, the author of the new book Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries. When reading the book, you can’t help but think about Eric Ries of The Lean Startup fame. Eric characterizes his Little Bets with the description of the Read More …

Improve your Sales Cycle, Work on your Feedback Loops

When I start talking about speeding up the sales cycle the initial reaction is that the sales cycle is controlled by the customer and there is just not much we can do about that. I usually counter with, most companies understand that there is an average sales cycle time and if we just agree that Read More …

The Little PDCA Sales Loop

The fundamental goals of your sales cycle should be one of discovery, learning and adaptability with a shared responsibility for a successful outcome. That implies that it is all about engaging both organizations into effective problem solving and learning. In applying this, think of the sales cycle in terms of a series of iterative loops Read More …

Taking the Lean Enterprise Outside the 4 Walls

Lean technology has now evolved from the manufacturing floor to the whole enterprise. Many companies have found real value in applying the fundamental concepts of Lean throughout the organization. The lean concepts of Kaizen, PDCA and the tools such as Pareto Charts, 5 Why’s and even Poka Yoke are commonplace. As a result of discussing Read More …