Business901

In the Business901 podcast, What Political Campaigns can teach business, part 1 of 2 we looked at a more strategic view. In today's podcast, we looked at the more tactical practices and how they related not only to a political campaign but to a typical marketing campaign.

Derek A. Pillie has served public and political candidates for over 15 years. He has served on the staff of Indiana’s Third Congressional District, most recently as District Director for just over a decade. In that role, he oversaw Indiana operations of the office; including constituent outreach and helping taxpayers solve problems with federal agencies. He also worked on crucial economic development projects and was heavily involved with advising the office on online media and marketing decisions.

After his federal service expired Derek started working at Cirrus ABS, an online marketing and technology development company. He currently manages their business development efforts. Cirrus ABS has added political campaigns to the portfolio of industries they serve since Derek joined the team, and he continues volunteer efforts on behalf of candidates he supports.

Related Information: Preview of Political Campaign Marketing Podcast Political Campaigning – Strategy Update What political campaigns can teach business Lean Six Sigma for Government

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Looking for immediate business? Is it taking too long to build a brand? Many of us look toward marketing to be our silver bullet, but seldom is it. We sometimes tire waiting for that marketing message to take hold and search for the latest and coolest gimmick to grab our prospects attention. Though I consider myself on the leading edge of these trends, I have come to appreciate that slow and steady wins many of the times. Driving home that consistent message is far more productive than being on the leading edge of every new marketing angle.

In my research I have also come to appreciate, What political campaigns can teach business. Few marketing processes do a better job of creating immediate business. With these thoughts in mind, I pursued Derek A. Pillie a leading political analyst for a Business901 Podcast. The interview lasted over an hour, as a result I split it in two parts. Part 1 is a strategic view of political campaigning and part 2( Will post tomorrow) is from a tactical viewpoint.

Derek has served public and political candidates for over 15 years. He has served on the staff of Indiana's Third Congressional District, most recently as District Director for just over a decade. In that role, he oversaw Indiana operations of the office; including constituent outreach and helping taxpayers solve problems with federal agencies. He also worked on crucial economic development projects and was heavily involved with advising the office on online media and marketing decisions.

After his federal service expired Derek started working at Cirrus ABS, an online marketing and technology development company. He currently manages their business development efforts. Cirrus ABS has added political campaigns to the portfolio of industries they serve since Derek joined the team, and he continues volunteer efforts on behalf of candidates he supports.

Related Information:

Preview of Political Campaign Marketing Podcast

Political Campaigning – Strategy Update

What political campaigns can teach business

Lean Six Sigma for Government

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Alan is an industry thought leader in Lean, Kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum and agile design. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in these areas. He is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives and also can be found on twitter @alshalloway.

Alan is the primary author of

Essential Skills for the Agile Developer: A Guide to Better Programming and Design

Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility

Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design

And a favorite of mine: Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams

This podcast is broken down into 3 parts. I had trouble running Alan down and finally caught him on his cell phone so the quality is not the best. However, Alan delivered great content and we could hardly stop talking. His view of the Agile community, Scrum, Kanban and Lean is unique and refreshing.

Part 1 of 3: Alan Shalloway discusses the state of Agile!, part 1 of 3

Part 2 of 3: Can Agile work at the Enterprise Level with Alan Shalloway?

Related Information:

The Lean Agile Train Software Transcription

Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA

Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development

The differences in Lean and Agile

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Alan is an industry thought leader in Lean, Kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum and agile design. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in these areas. He is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives and also can be found on twitter @alshalloway.

Alan is the primary author of

Essential Skills for the Agile Developer: A Guide to Better Programming and Design

Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility

Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design

And a favorite of mine: Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams

This podcast is broken down into 3 parts. I had trouble running Alan down and finally caught him on his cell phone so the quality is not the best. However, Alan delivered great content and we could hardly stop talking. His view of the Agile community, Scrum, Kanban and Lean is unique and refreshing.

Part 1 of 3: Alan Shalloway discusses the state of Agile!, part 1 of 3

Related Information:

The Lean Agile Train Software Transcription

Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA

Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development

The differences in Lean and Agile

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Alan is an industry thought leader in Lean, Kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum and agile design. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in these areas. He is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives and also can be found on twitter @alshalloway.

Alan is the primary author of

Essential Skills for the Agile Developer: A Guide to Better Programming and Design

Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility

Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design

And a favorite of mine: Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams

This podcast is broken down into 3 parts. I had trouble running Alan down and finally caught him on his cell phone so the quality is not the best. However, Alan delivered some great content and we could hardly stop talking. His view of the Agile community, Scrum, Kanban and Lean is unique and refreshing.

Related Subject discussed in podcast: A transcription of the Business901 Podcast, Should you Manage your Organization with Agile Techniques?. My guest was Steve Denning’s, author of the new book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century (Jossey-Bass, 2010).

Related Information:

The Lean Agile Train Software Transcription

Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA

Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development

The differences in Lean and Agile

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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 customer's needs: how the customer defines value in a product or service.  Among the numerous key ideas and practices are:

• Insight on understanding the different types of clients you serve—and how your products deliver value to them
• Ways to design specific frameworks for discovering service innovation opportunities for new, improved, and supplementary service products
• Practical guidance on staying focused on the "fuzzy front end" of service innovation
• The fundamental elements of a winning service strategy

We did not get to all of these points in the podcast with Lance. You would have to read his book,Service Innovation: How to Go from Customer Needs to Breakthrough Services to find all of them. But we did begin the conversation discussing Job-Centric Innovation, an idea that Lance is an expert on.

After several years on the marketing faculty at Indiana University, he began his career as an innovation consultant with Strategyn. His book is a melding of his personal skills and passion for services and innovation. He is currently an independent innovation speaker and trainer, providing executive education to many of the world's leading companies.

Related Information:

The Service-dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate, And Directions

If all of us need to be marketers, what’s the framework?

7 Principles of Universal Design & Beyond

The Common Thread of Design Thinking, Service Design and Lean Marketing

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Is Demand Driven Material Requirements Planning the blueprint for the future and revitalization of formal planning in the 21st Century? Some people think so as Carol Ptak and Chad Smith were asked to co-author the new Orlicky's Material Requirements Planning 3/E. But more impressive are the full houses of practitioners that Carol and Chad are talking too. The one simple reason for that is that they understand the problem.

Carol and Chad both were on previous podcasts with me, In a Supply Chain, Where is more important than How Much! and Can MRP be a Demand – Driven Tool?. These podcasts were my most quotable ones this past year. For example Carol Ptak, said in her podcast said:

A lot of people have focused on the fact that the Economic times right now are really bad. What a lot of people are missing is the fact that the world around us has fundamentally changed.

A we see now across the world is that we have excess capacity when you add to that the Internet where we get on the Internet we expect to have an experience like Amazon, or order it is going to tell me instantly when I’m going to get it. If you don’t provide it at the price I want to pay and the time I want to pay then I can just go someplace else. Why can I do that? That’s because I have all this excess capacity out there.

So what companies are seeing today is volatility like they never had to manage before and at the same time they no longer have the reliability of understanding what the customers are going to demand and when they’re going to demand, because customers are increasingly fickle.

So what we’ve got is the perfect storm that has come together of excess capacity and incredible product variety.

The two of them did not disappoint me. These two people are have rewritten the book on MRP and if you don’t think MRP or even your Lean Supply Chain could not learn from this podcast, think again.

Carol has written several books on MRP, ERP, Lean and Theory of Constraints.  She is the Past President of APICS International and former Vice President and global industry executive for manufacturing and distribution industries at PeopleSoft.  Chad co-founded Constraints Management Group in 1997 after working under the tutelage of Dr. Eli Goldratt for several years.  Constraints Management Group specializes in demand driven supply chain and manufacturing solutions for a variety of industries.  Clients have included Boeing, Unilever, IBM, LeTourneau Technologies and Roseburg Forest Products.

What is Demand Driven Material Requirements Planning (DDMRP)?

Demand Driven Material Requirements Planning is an innovative multi-echelon pull methodology to plan inventories and materials. It enables a company to build more closely to actual market requirements and promotes better and quicker decisions and actions at the planning and execution level.

Related Information:

The Perfect Storm has come together of Excess Capacity and Product Variety

Will Product Managers embrace Open Innovation?

Implementing the TOC Supply Chain Solution

Transforming your Supply Chain to a Lean Fulfillment Stream eBook

Lean Six Sigma applied to Supply Chain

Application of Lean Six Sigma to the Supply Chain

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I was participating in a discussion on LinkedIn and came across an article, How to Sustain Front Line Process Improvement Activities from the Harvard Business Review and like most of us, if it says sustainability we take a look. It has to be the most difficult part of any continuous improvement process.

I found the author of the article, Brad Power handling the comments masterfully and engaging in a great dialogue with the commenters. He is actually researching sustaining attention to process management and is currently conducting research with the Lean Enterprise Institute.

Our podcast centered on Brad’s research of sustainability and his findings so far may not be unique but the structure he puts to his information is.  Also, I think you will find out as much about researching and the questions you ask as you will sustainability. At times I wondered who was being interviewed.

Brad Power is a consultant and researcher in process innovation. In his latest consulting engagement, for over a year he's been helping a healthcare insurance company reengineer its interactions with providers and members to reduce cycle times. And for the last three years he's been researching why few companies sustain their attention to process management — how they can make improvement and adaptation a habit (even fun?). He's been collaborating with the Lean Enterprise Institute on his research. You can see some of his research insights in his blog posts at The Harvard Business Review at bradfordpower.tumblr.com. He's interested in hearing stories of companies which embarked on a process improvement program and either kept going, or didn't, and why.

Related Information:

Learn more about the Xerox Design for Lean Six Sigma

Design for Lean Six Sigma, The Xerox Way

Sustaining Lean in Manufacturing

Does Lean Marketing deliver what the customer wants?

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Games have changed the way we play and the way we work. In the  blog post Salesforce.com's Chief Scientist on Why Gamification is the Future of Work, it says,

Rangaswami outlines how and why gamification will shape the future of work. As a new generation of knowledge workers land in jobs at organizations big and small, they're bringing with them different expectations and are motivated differently than workers once were. One way to motivate those workers is by incorporating game mechanics into the workplace, especially when it comes to rewarding worker performance.

One way to motivate those workers is by incorporating game mechanics into the workplace, especially when it comes to rewarding worker performance.

I decided rather than discussing gaming with a bunch of 50 year old marketers it might be better to just go to Gemba (the real place). I found one of the top Gamer’s in the world and  discussed with him the art of gaming. His insights into teamwork, respect for people and planning skills are interesting. After listening to this podcast, I think you may find less to worry about in the future generation. In fact, the number one reason your organization needs to understand gaming is it may be your only chance to attract the best and brightest talent in the future.

My guest, Peter is part of a highly rated team (sGty) playing the game Heroes of Newerth, HoN.  Peter can be found @peterpandam on Twitter where he posts the time of his live stream games. The recorded streams are available on Justin TV. His Facebook page is Peterpandam.

Related Information:

Is every Boardroom discussing Gamification? Is yours?

Three more ways to Improve your Marketing!

The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot Revisited

Lean Thinking: Prototype early and often

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Dean Leffingwell author of Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise (Agile Software Development Series) was the guest on the Businss901 podcast. I talked to Dean so long that I divided the podcast into two parts. The 1st part, Lean Agile Software Train, part 1 published last Tuesday. That podcast is under thirty minutes and touches more upon Dean’s experience with organizations. The 2nd part below takes the deep dive into building the Lean Agile Software Enterprise.

About: Dean Leffingwell is a consultant, entrepreneur, software executive and technical author who provides product strategy, business advisory services and enterprise-level agility coaching to large software enterprises.

Mr. Leffingwell was founder and CEO of consumer marketing identity company ProQuo, Inc. Dean has also served as chief methodologist to Rally Software and as business consultant to Ping Identity Corporation and Roving Planet, Inc. Formerly, he served as Vice President of Rational Software, now IBM’s Rational Division, where he was responsible for the Rational Unified Process and promulgation of the UML. Previously, Leffingwell was co-founder and CEO of software tools company Requisite, Inc., makers of RequisitePro for requirements management, which was acquired by Rational. Mr. Leffingwell was also the founder and CEO of RELA, Inc., and publicly held Colorado MEDtech.

Info on Dean:

Dean’s Website

Dean’s Blog

Dean’s other Book(Amazon): Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises

Related Information:

Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA

Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development

The differences in Lean and Agile

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The Friday Video Series with Dr. Michael Balle, the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute recently competed a two month long series on Kaizen. I have included the entire audio of the conversation as a podcast. Even if you have watched the videos I think you will find it worthwhile.

Dr. Balle is a multiple Shingo Prize winner as an author of the The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager. His newest Shingo Prize was on the adaption of The Gold Mine: A Novel of Lean Turnaround to an audiobook that features performances by multiple readers who bring its realistic business story and characters to life.

Dr. Michael Balle is the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute

Related Information:

SALES PDCA Framework for Lean Sales and Marketing

Continuous Improvement, The Toyota Way

Marketing with PDCA eBook released on Business901 Website

Lean is not a revolution, Lean is solve one thing and prove one thing!

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Dean Leffingwell author of Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise (Agile Software Development Series) was the guest on the Businss901 podcast. After reading this book, I thought it was an outstanding contribution to improving the agile team and environment. One Amazon reviewer categorized it as  “The organization of the book builds "tactical" topics one-by-one with the three main levels of the enterprise: starting with the team, then discussing the program level and concluding at the enterprise portfolio level. "But no need to retell the whole book here -- it's easier to read it. It's a great read for anyone looking for systematic and efficient ways of improving software development at scale.”

I talked to Dean so long that I divided the podcast into two parts. The 2nd part will publish next Tuesday and it is the portion of the podcast where we take the deep dive into building the Lean Agile Software Enterprise.  This podcast for me is pretty short, it is under thirty minutes and touches more upon Dean’s experience with organizations rather than his mastery of Lean Agile Software Requirements.

About: Dean Leffingwell is a consultant, entrepreneur, software executive and technical author who provides product strategy, business advisory services and enterprise-level agility coaching to large software enterprises.

Mr. Leffingwell was founder and CEO of consumer marketing identity company ProQuo, Inc. Dean has also served as chief methodologist to Rally Software and as business consultant to Ping Identity Corporation and Roving Planet, Inc. Formerly, he served as Vice President of Rational Software, now IBM’s Rational Division, where he was responsible for the Rational Unified Process and promulgation of the UML. Previously, Leffingwell was co-founder and CEO of software tools company Requisite, Inc., makers of RequisitePro for requirements management, which was acquired by Rational. Mr. Leffingwell was also the founder and CEO of RELA, Inc., and publicly held Colorado MEDtech.

Info on Dean:

Dean’s Website

Dean’s Blog

Dean’s other Book(Amazon): Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises

Related Information:

Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA

Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA

Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development

The differences in Lean and Agile

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