Scaling Customer Decision Making Process

In yesterday’s blog post, I made a statement that I find a striking resemblance in the Toyota Supplier hierarchy (on left) depicted by Liker and Meier (The Toyota Way Fieldbook) and the Economic Pyramid model (on right) of Pines and Gilmore (The Experience Economy). It deserves a better description. If we were to view the Read More …

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 Read More …

Rethinking Customer Needs w Innovation

True service innovation demands that you shift the focus away from the solution and back to the customer. To achieve this shift in your business–one that takes you from making educated guesses to building a clear model to guide service innovation—Lance Bettencourt instructs on the finer points of how to rethink your approach to the Read More …

Why the Lean SALES PDCA Cycle was Created!

I struggle with Lean when thought of as waste reduction tool versus a Knowledge Creating Methodology. Many people and organizations want to jump into the mode of waste reduction when working with a sales and marketing cycle. It is one of the reasons I created the SALES PDCA cycle. The SALES PDCA cycle creates two Read More …

Gaming can make a better world

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how. Related Information: 7 Principles of Universal Design & Beyond The Common Thread of Design Thinking, Read More …

Will Lean always internalize the customer

I was in a recent LinkedIn discussion that referred to Sales and Marketing customer as being the internal organization and their role was to optimize the throughput of the observation. The sales and marketing role was further explained in the terms of takt time based on optimal production of the organization. The goal of sales Read More …