Archive for Value Stream

Apr
25

Leading Lean from the Middle

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Paul Yandell of Value Stream Focus was interviewed in the Business901 podcast, Transforming Lean thru Middle Managers. This is a transcription of the podcast.

Paul Yandell is a manufacturing and supply chain specialist with strong skills in identifying and eliminating waste and improving operational performance.  His particular strengths are building infrastructure to support turnaround and growth situations, building and leading teams in total quality environments and he is bilingual (Spanish).

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Mark Tamis @ marktamis.com recently presented at the Selfservice Company UG and below is a copy of his slidedeck via slideshare. A blog post of Mark’s, Go With The Customer Flow is an insightful read. Read the entire thread to include the comments And…watch the video at the end of the blog post- exhilarating for a Monday morning!

What did Mark capture in this presentation? I believe that Mark actually depicts the Social Media Landscape accurately. Mark says, ”99% of interaction take place outside of Social Media!.” Many Social Media pundits will emphasize its importance and  expand to be the focal point for delivering your message. The importance of Social Media has not been about delivering messages but how your “organization’s persona (brand)” has shifted to the hands of the public. This perspective is driving organizations to better understand customers through out the entire customer journey. An end to end value stream, where the focal point is the customer rather than internal operations that ends with a transaction.

Organizations can no longer feed products to customers, as I described in the blog post, Kill the Sales and Marketing Funnel. Customers have the ability to access resources and information comparable to their suppliers and choose suppliers by their own definition of value and how that value should be created. The new wave of marketing has seen an entire new set of tools being used. No longer do we trust print media, radio, television and other forms of traditional media. The tools have all become a commodity. To make effective marketing decisions, you need a clear understanding of what the customer values and what your company strategy is to support them.

Related Information:
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This is one of the few books that I not only listened to it, but afterwards purchased the hard copy.Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others is simply a good book.

The author of Borrowing Brilliance, David Kord Murray, has an impressive résumé. Not only is he a rocket scientist who worked on numerous projects for NASA and the Pentagon but he’s also a successful entrepreneur, having sold Taxnet, a company he co-founded that specializes in e-filing software, to H&R Block (HRB) in 2005. And in between those items on his CV is a strong hint that he practices what he preaches. When Murray was head of innovation at Intuit (INTU)—the creator of TurboTax, which allows users to e-file—he saw a brilliant idea, borrowed a chunk of it, and made a killing. His book encourages everyone to give it a try. After all, he argues, it worked for Johannes Gutenberg, George Lucas, and the Google guys.

A Business Week Review:

The Good: Practical and simple advice on how to come up with new products and services by cherry-picking, then combining, others’ ideas.

The Bad: Author Murray often repeats his main points—even some of his anecdotes

The Bottom Line: An entertaining, easy-to-read romp through the history of innovation, from Gutenberg to the Google guys, plus a method that appears to actually work.

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