Related Information:
Quallaboration Podcast with Personal Kanban Founder
Jim Benson talks about quallaboration – YouTube
Successful Lean teams are iTeams
Teamwork Is an Individual Skill.

Special Offer

It is even more special for a limited time, if you visit the Business901 website and wait 30 Seconds!

Lean Marketing House (More Info): A starting point for creating true iterative marketing cycles based on not only Lean principles but more importantly Customer Value. Recommended 1st reading of series.

Marketing with PDCA (More Info): Targeting what your Customer Values at each stage of the cycle will increase your ability to deliver quicker, more accurately and with better value than your competitor. It is a moving target and the principles of Lean and PDCA facilitates the journey to Customer Value. Recommended 2nd reading of series.

Lean Engagement Team(More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible. Recommended 3rd reading of series.

Marketing with A3(More Info): Enables sales and marketing to use the Lean tool of A3 as a structured approach for their problem solving, strategies and tactics. Recommended 4th reading of series.

Save when buying all 4

This series of books are about developing a continuous improvement culture in your sales and marketing and re-positioning your customer as the center of your organization. The further we are from our customers’ knowledge base the more effort has to be made to create a larger and larger supply of prospects. The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible. Successful Sales and Marketing are no longer trying to get their message out but developing strategies to get the message in.

Disclaimer: There is no silver bullet introduced in these books.

Related Information:
Lean Marketing House
Marketing with PDCA
Lean Engagement Team
Marketing with A3

Lean is the future of marketing and one of the main reasons is the development of Agile under the Lean umbrella. Using the Agile Manifesto as a basis for Agile marketing or Lean marketing is a good start. In summary they are based on these principles:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Content-rich material over elaborate promotion
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Response to changing customer needs over following a plan

The further we are from our customers’ knowledge base the more effort has to be made to create a larger and larger supply of prospects. The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible. Successful Sales and Marketing Teams are no longer trying to get their message out but developing strategies to get the message in.

Table of Contents

• The Path
• Positioning your organization from your customer’s viewpoint
• Only the Customer Determine Value
• PDCA from the Outside-In
• The iCustomer and iTeam
• New Lean Thinking
• Lean Engagement Tools
• Lean Engagement Team
• Marketing Gateway of EDCA, PDCA, SDCA

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]

Related Information:
SALES PDCA Framework for Lean Sales and Marketing
Profound knowledge for Lean Marketing
If all of us need to be marketers, what’s the framework?
The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota

So before you buy the books above or enroll in a Business901 program check out the special offers that are provided for being a member of the group.

Related Information:
Lean Marketing Lab Opens!
Start with Journey Mapping vs Value Stream Mapping
It’s not about the things we make, it’s how we use the things we make
GE CMO sheds her view on Design Thinking

Don is always entertaining and has such a way with explaining statistics that he makes himself difficult to argue with. This time he took on Dr. Edward Deming and for most of us it would seem to be an overwhelming task. Deming – loyalist should understand that Don makes his case outside of manufacturing. He questions if precise optimization is toxic in product development or knowledge work. Such as:

• Is preventing problems always better than correcting them?
• Should we really try to eliminate as much variability as possible?
• Does responding to normal variation make performance worse?
• Did Deming understand Kanban?
• Is 3 Sigma upper and lower control limits correct for you?

In this presentation, Don Reinertsen discusses the limitations of Deming’s ideas and how to go beyond them.

Don Reinertsen – Is It Time to Rethink Deming? from AGILEMinds on Vimeo.

I would consider myself a Deming Loyalist. However, I do agree with Don on many of his points. It is the evolution of Lean that is being discussed. As we apply Lean outside of manufacturing many of the basic assumptions that we tie to Deming and Lean may not be valid. Following the principles of John Boyd’s, OODA Loop for a better prescription may open the doors for Lean to prosper outside of traditional process thinking.

An example of this is The Lean Startup where if you review the first writings of Eric Ries you will see the influence of not Deming but The OODA Loop and Don Reinertsen.  When you look at the my outline for Lean Sales and Marketing, it follows a similar pattern. It concentrate on the Demand side of the business which requires and encourages variation. It requires placing economic value as part of statistical control. It requires us to look at Lean with a fresh set of eyes!

You gotta like a guy that stirs the pot. Thanks Don!

Related Information:
Why the Lean SALES PDCA Cycle was Created!
Deming was just simply wrong about variation…
Why won’t Lean commit to the Demand Chain the way it committed to the Supply chain?
Lean Marketing: Sales Quotas lead to Waste
Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos
Creating Flow with Don Reinertsen
Why should 50% of your marketing fail?

The paper covers the development of PDCA from the introduction to the scientific method (you could argue between Aristotle or Galileo) to the latest development covered by the paper with the addition of the Model for Improvement published and described in The Improvement Guide. This book was published in 2009.

In reading the research paper, I discovered that somewhere along the line when the Japanese executives recast the Deming wheel at the 1950 JUSE seminar into the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle till now, we lost that all important external outlook of PDCA to one of an internally focused improvement methodology. In the book, Kaizen: The Key To Japan’s Competitive Success, Masaaki Imai shows the correlation between the Deming wheel and the PDCA cycle in Figure 5 developed at the seminar.

1. Design – Plan:  Product design corresponds to the planning phase of management
2. Production – Do:  Production corresponds to doing-making, or working on the
   product that was designed
3. Sales – Check: Sales figures confirm whether the customer is satisfied
4. Research – Action:  In case of a complaint being filed, it has to be incorporated into the planning phase, and action taken for the next round of efforts

In the paper, Evolution of the PDCA Cycle, it goes on to state:

By the 1960’s the PDCA cycle in Japan had evolved into an improvement cycle and a
management tool. Lilrank and Kano state the 7 basic tools (check sheet, histograms,
Pareto chart, fishbone diagram, graphs, scatter diagrams, and stratification) highlight the
central principle of Japanese quality.

I believe that somewhere between these two points the Check stage of PDCA due to the introduction of the 7 Quality Tools became internally focused and developed along that path during the years of process improvement.

In the last decade we have evolved from the processed driven culture of the 90’s through the Customer Centric to the new culture of User Centric. The scientific method and PDCA works. As a result it adapts and evolves with time. A measure of that is the popularity of Eric Ries and the Lean Startup with the use of Build – Measure – Learn. Also the latest evolvement of Design Thinking and more specifically the Service Design field highlighted in my post, Can Service Design increase Customer demand? has established a basis for EDCA (Explore-Do-Check_Act).

In addition to our thinking, we must change our toolset. We need a complimentary toolset which was outlined in a previous post, Continuous Improvement Sales and Marketing Toolset.  I am not saying that we throw away the 7 Quality Tools but we do not use them before their time. They have become more useful in the Standardization process and therefore the SDCA cycle. This is a list of the 7 basic Quality Tools to be used in SDCA:

1. Cause-and-effect diagram
2. Check sheet
3. Control charts
4. Histogram
5. Pareto chart
6. Scatter diagram
7. Stratification

In 1976, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) saw the need for tools to promote innovation, communicate information and successfully plan major projects. A team researched and developed the seven new quality control tools, often called the seven management and planning (MP) tools, or simply the seven management tools. This is the set that I propose to be used in PDCA:

1. Affinity diagram
2. Relations diagram
3. Tree diagram
4. Matrix diagram:
5. Matrix data analysis
6. Arrow diagram
7. Process decision program chart (PDPC)

Today’s world has introduced more and more uncertainty. As a result it has forced us to get closer and closer to our customers. This reduces are reaction time and allows us to make better informed decisions. This methodology has been introduced to us through the concepts of Design Thinking. This is the set that I propose to be used in EDCA:

1. Visualization
2. Journey Mapping
3. Value Chain Analysis
4. Mind Mapping
5. Brainstorming
6. Concept Development
7. Assumption Testing
8. Rapid Prototyping
9. Customer Co-Creation
10. Learning Launch

I am not saying that tools cannot cross over into other cycles. Tools must be used as and only when needed. But through the process of defining your toolset it will assist you in understanding the cycles of continuous improvement in Lean Sales and Marketing.

So, like the possum that has adapted and survived where others have become extinct, the scientific method and PDCA will continue to evolve and live.