GE CMO sheds her view on Design Thinking

In a rare interview, GE’s SVP and Chief Marketing Officer Beth Comstock talks to Behance’s Scott Belsky about what it takes to keep great ideas alive in a big company. Offering essential insights for creative leaders, the conversation touches on the power of passion and storytelling in getting ideas off the ground, why we should Read More …

The Resilience of PDCA

A few weeks ago I wrote the blog post, The Death of PDCA that stated: “following traditional Lean thinking leads us to focus our efforts of continuous improvement internally versus externally”. Knowing my interest in the Evolution of PDCA, Karen Martin a well-regarded Lean consultant and co-author of The Kaizen Event Planner sent me Evolution Read More …

Lean A3 for Lean EDCA-PDCA-SDCA

SALES PDCA is the framework I use for the process that takes place in the customer sales and marketing cycle. It is 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 …

Does Lean need to move beyond Deming?

The Agile Minds Group in Belgium recently held a conference on Lean Software Development. The speakers were a few of my favorite podcast guests such as Jim Benson , David Anderson and Don Reinertsen. Don is always entertaining and has such a way with explaining statistics that he makes himself difficult to argue with. This Read More …

Who Determines Success of Your Business

USERS, NOT CUSTOMERS Forrester predicts that by 2012 half of all consumer purchases will either be transacted online or driven by online research and word of mouth. To succeed in the digital marketplace, it’s no longer customers that matter most, but users—anyone who interacts with your company digitally. Keep users happy, and customers follow. The Read More …

Start w Journey vs Value Stream Mapping

Value Stream Mapping is a process most consider an exercise for finding and removing waste. It is a foundational Lean Tool that typically gets introduced early in a Lean Transformation. A Systems2win Excel template is depicted below: In Sales and Marketing you will utilize a Value Stream Mapping process on a project by project basis but Read More …