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May

How Zing Training Started! -

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Next week’s Business901 Podcast features Ari Weinzweig, CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Mich. The Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) has annual sales approaching $40 million. ZingTrain, a consulting and training company that shares Zingerman’s approach to business with like-minded organizations from around the world, and offers a variety of management training seminars in Ann Arbor, as well as customized workshops and presentations at client sites. An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe: A big part of your organization has become Zing Training. What started that? Did you just wake up one day and say, "Gee, we need to bottle this up?"

Ari: ‘Well, we opened in ’82, and then in ’93, Paul and I spent about a year writing a new vision for the business. When we opened, we were very clear about our vision. And actually the first natural law of business, I think, is organizations that have a clear vision of greatness are going to have a better shot at succeeding. So when we opened in ’82, we were very clear in our minds and what we wrote down that we only wanted one deli. We didn’t want a chain or replicas. We knew that we wanted something that was unique to us and not a copy of something from New York, or Chicago, or LA.

We knew that we wanted really great food and service but in a very accessible setting, and that we wanted a really great place for people to work, and to be bonded into the community. By ’93, so 10, 11 years in, I mean, we kind of had done that. In that, we had filled in, expanded twice on the site that we’re on.

We’re in the historic district, so it’s not easy to do that. We kind of had, I guess in hindsight what would be the equivalent of an organizational "midlife struggle."

I don’t think it was a crisis, because we weren’t crashing, but we weren’t really clear on where we were going. We had achieved what we had set out to do despite going against the odds. So we spent about a year coming up with our next vision, which we wrote out.

It was called Zingerman’s 2009, so it was for 15 years into the future. That vision outlined that we would have a community of businesses all here in the Ann Arbor area, because we like to be connected to what we’re doing.

Each building should be a Zingerman’s business, but each would have its own unique specialty. So that way, we could grow but keep the deli unique, and do other things. And we would only do a business when we had a managing partner or partners in it that would own part of that business and have a passion for whatever that business did, and be connected to it every day going for greatness.

And after we wrote that vision and rolled it out, then Maggie Bayless‑‑who we had known at the restaurant‑‑ she had been, I mentioned a waitress there. But she had gone back to school and gotten her MBA at Michigan, and wasn’t that thrilled with the corporate world, but loved training.

She read that vision. She came to us and said, "Well, what about doing a Zingerman’s training business?" That’s how it started, then we worked on it for a while and opened it up in 1994.”

I have written about Zingerman’s many timese and in fact, Ari’s book,Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service, provided the service outline for a retail operation that I was part of for several years. Several mindmaps and more details are in this blog post, PDCA Cycle of Zingerman’s Deli.

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May

Can Lean be driven by Middle Management?

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Paul Yandell: I speak to middle managers, I was a resident with them. I think most of us have been middle managers and understand those frustrations. I hit on a theme of a guerilla manager, years and years ago, and I’ve actually given a similar talk to a number of national and local forums. It really resonates with people, because people stuck in the middle are trying to figure, "What do I do? How do I be effective?"

Many of them are waiting for leadership. I’ve also done a lot of teaching, and I find my students are the same way. They’re kind of like, "I’m learning Lean tools, but how do I put them to use?" I’m trying to say, "Just go right ahead. Don’t wait for your CEO to say, ‘We’re going to go down this path.’ Just start leading the company from the middle and you can be quite effective." We did that at Dimension One Spas, and we completely turned around the culture and transformed the company to a Lean company. We ended up winning a regional Shingo prize. It was kind of a validation of our efforts.

But it was really like a middle management revolt, if you will. The owner, like many small business owners, didn’t take a strong interest in manufacturing. They want to make sure there’s no problems in manufacturing, but they’re not really sure how to build things. They’re more sales people or finance people, generally. When they see someone getting traction, they generally say, "OK," as long as you’re getting top management support, you don’t need top management leadership. I think many people think they need leadership. There’s a big difference. I think you can lead from the middle if you have support from the top.

Joe Dager: You’re singing my message, Paul. I’ve already started the podcast because I thought what you just said here is golden.

Paul Yandell of Value Stream Focus is my podcast guest next week and we discussed one of my favorite topics – Middle Management. Paul Yandell, led a lean transformation that won the 2007 Pacific Northwest Silver Medallion Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing. Business Week called the Shingo Prize the "Nobel Prize for Manufacturing".

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Apr

Moving from Product to Customer Centric in 4 Steps

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Becoming customer centric requires an organization to understand the emotional needs and difficulties of their prospects and customers (only the term “customer” will be used for the balance of the blog post). I have recently done a series of blog posts on empathy (The Role of Empathy in Design), that goes deeper into this subject.

Today’s marketing is not about getting the message out – it is about bringing the message in. Most organizations struggle in their attempts as they evaluate seas of data and lose the personality of the customer using such terminology as markets or value streams. They have a tendency to view marketing as product centric rather than customer/user centric.

You don’t wake up one day and become customer centric. It is not quite that easy. However, a concentrated effort by sales and marketing with just a few priorities can start your organization on the right path and radically improve your chances of moving from product to customer centric.

1. Reduce complexity: Few companies can simply market by collecting more demographic data, psychographic or subjective information. Data should not be ignored; however, in the absence of a customer context, data will provide little value and be desperately in need of direction.

2. Establish the user experience as the basis of collaboration: Framing the marketing effort in the context of the customer allows everyone the opportunity to participate. Everyone can act as the customer and can contribute insight about how the user experience can be improved. Understanding how empowerment varies among roles and evolves over time can help to create priorities and informed decisions.

3. Use maps to guide the way: Mapping products and personas in terms of needs, desires, and aspirations fuels the marketing process with clarity and empathy from the outset. This is not only a powerful tool for understanding how to appeal to customers but it can also shape the debate about trade-offs that are an inherent part of implementation. Customer insight can reveal value and non-value added task. The visual understanding provided by mapping can provide a reality check and a benchmark throughout the sales and marketing process. The direction should he determined by the needs of customers and the particular company’s strategy. Strive for the ability to see where there is a disconnect between your offerings in the market and the desires of the customer to improve the user experience and bridge the gap.

4. Aim for a compass, not a GPS: Identifying an opportunity zone can increase the chances of success by focusing a team’s attention on a fixed number of priorities. These form the basis for experimentation during the sales and marketing process. The idea is to provide a clear direction but allows freedom to all parties to generate different approaches.

My research for this post came from the recent reading of Predictable Magic: Unleash the Power of Design Strategy to Transform Your Business. The authors use these four interactions on How to Create a Design Strategy. I found the same principles applying directly to customer centric marketing. In the book, there is a special tool that the authors call the Psycho-Aesthetics Map. This is a two-dimensional mapping process in which the vertical axis shows the degree of need, from essential through to aspirational, while the horizontal axis shows the degree of interactivity from passive through to immersive. Existing products can be placed in their appropriate locations on the map, as can different groups of consumers, in order to identify gaps which might be suitable for the design of new products. More about this later.

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