Forrest Breyfogle: is the CEO of Smarter Solutions. Forest has authored or co-authored over a dozen books. His most recent book is The Business Process Management Guidebook: An Integrated Enterprise Excellence BPM System. His five-book set, Integrated Enterprise Excellence provides radical management advancements in the utilization and integration of scorecards, strategic planning, and process improvement.

Forrest. Breyfogle was named Quality Professional of the Year for 2011 by Quality Magazine and in 2012 was awarded alumni of the year by Missouri University of Science and Technology. He also received the prestigious Crosby Medal from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) in 2004 for an earlier book, Implementing Six Sigma and was presented the Leadership Award at the 2013 Lean & Six Sigma World Conference.

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Special Marketing with Lean Book and Program offers on Facebook

David Shaked of Almond-Insight  has just finished his book, Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma: Building Positive and Engaging Business Improvement. Using various strength-based approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry, David

has created a radically different way to approach Lean Six Sigma. He

calls this method Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma. David is a Master Black

Belt formerly with a large global corporation and has specific

experience in transactional processes such as sales, marketing, finance,

order fulfillment, customer services, distribution, demand forecasting.I have blogged in the past, An Appreciative look at the Seven Signs of Value (Waste), about some of David’s work and interviewed him in a previous Business901 Podcast, Strength–Based Lean and Six Sigma.

Leigh Ashton is the author of iSell and head of The Sales Consultancy. She specializes in helping people incorporate psychology alongside technical selling skills – leading to positive changes to their attitude, their approach and their sales results.

Leigh works with business owners, directors, managers and sales teams to identify and eliminate their psychological barriers, their internal limiting beliefs...and the reasons or excuses they use to rationalize their lack of consistently great sales. Once these deeper changes have taken place...they are motivated to incorporate positive new behavior's on a long term basis. Leigh’s mantra is to leave people feeling inspired and motivated to take action!

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Recently, The San Francisco Business Times presented Mark with a "Bay Area's

Most Admired CEO Award." Fast Company has recognized him in its "Who's Next"

column, and TechShop received the EXPY Award, given to the "experience stager of

the year."

TechShop, a do-it-yourself workshop and fabrication studio with six locations

open and hundreds more planned over the next decade, is the largest public

access tools and computer enabled manufacturing platform in the world. Through

TechShop, Mark is focused on radically democratizing access to the tools of

innovation by providing the lowest cost access to tools the world has ever

seen. TechShop is poised to help reshape how the world does innovation and

manufacturing and has already begun to have a significant impact on the economic

development opportunities in the communities where it is built.

Mark recently authored The

Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters,

Hackers, and Tinkerers to capture his learnings and I do not believe you

will be disappointed in the book or the podcast.

Preston

W. Blevins career spans over forty-five years with two related careers.

The first as a manufacturing operations and supply-chain practitioner,

and the second in the ERP/supply-chain

software industry. During his second career, he has specialized in

helping companies understand, acquire, implement, and maintain

world-class business practices and systems using advanced information

technology. Responsibilities during this second career have included

general management, program/project management, marketing, sales,

consulting, and education and training. He has lived and worked offshore

on several multi-year assignments focused on business unit start-up or

turn-around. He has been involved with the professional association

APICS in many key management positions as a volunteer including service

as a corporate Board of Director (BOD).

Blevins has authored more than fifty conference white papers and

magazine articles. Topics covered in these publications include Advanced

Master Scheduling (and S&OP), complex manufacturing (ET0), service

centric manufacturing, the food supply-chain, and industrial

eco-sustainability. Our podcast discussed Preston’s new book Food Safety Regulatory Compliance: Catalyst for a Lean and Sustainable Food Supply Chain (Resource Management).

Learn how you can help increase Food Safety Awareness

I just purchased The Lean Change Method by @thomasjeffrey #leanchange is the suggested tweet for this book. Help Jeff Anderson spread the word about this book on Twitter!

Managing Agile Organizational Transformation: Learn how to manage agile adoption initiatives using the Lean Change method. The Lean Change method extends the Kotter change management lifecycle with high feedback, iterative planning practices based on validated learning and other techniques taken from Lean Startup.

These were the techniques discussed in the podcast with Jeff Anderson, the catalyst behind the Lean Change Method. More information is available about the Lean Change Method at http://agileconsulting.blogspot.com/.  Jeff leads the Deloitte Lean market offering, providing advisory, transformation, and change management services to software technology based organizations, helping them transform through the use of agile and lean methods.Lean Engagement Team (More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible.

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Midnight Lunch: The 4 Phases of Team Collaboration Success from Thomas Edison’s Lab was a book that fascinated me. Author Sarah Miller Caldicott, a descendant of Thomas Edison, , innovation author and CEO of Power Patterns. provides a look at how Edison's collaboration methods can be used face-to-face and by virtual teams. Many of us struggle in building innovative teams through collaboration and were just considering one product or service. Edison's collaborative approach propelled him to generate a record-breaking 1,093 US patents and 1,293 international patents over 62 consecutive years. A few lessons to be learned?

Inspired by a family lineage of inventors dating back five generations, she has been engaged in creativity and innovation throughout her life. Sarah spent the first 15 years of her 25-year career as a Marketing executive with Global 500 firms including Quaker Oats and the Helene Curtis subsidiary of Unilever. As a leader of global innovation teams, Sarah was responsible for major brand launches in the US, Europe, and Asia. She co-authored the first book ever written on Edison’s innovation process, titled Innovate Like Edison: The Five-Step System for Breakthrough Business Success.

Eric Michrowski says in the podcast, "This is where the

psychology comes into is, the attitudes and their beliefs of the team

member drive the behaviors, and the behaviors drive the results. You

can’t hammer in behaviors, you got to start zeroing in on the attitudes

and beliefs, and that’s really also linked to employee engagement so

that’s where all the elements around “How do I lead, how do I go about

telling it” and appreciate the team members that I have start really

shifting which is also why at every intervention or activity that we do,

the first metric to dramatically shift is around employee engagement.

The others are either side effects of employee engagement or direct

contribution of what you’re doing. I mean it’s well-documented from

research boiling down to that if you start impacting engagement, you’d

get some whopping impact on absenteeism, on turnover, on things such as

safety incidents, in terms quality outcomes, but also productivity,

profitability and customer experience."Eric Michrowski is a globally recognized leader in combining

Human Performance, Operational Excellence and Process Improvement to

drive Business Transformations that achieve substantial shifts in

Customer Experience, Operational Reliability, Employee Engagement and

Financial Performance.   Combining elements of Organizational

Development and Change Management, his approach is anchored in over 15

years of hands-on experience in a blend of Operations Management and

Management Consulting roles across Financial Services,

Telecommunications/IT, Airlines and Logistics.In addition to leading operational portfolios, transformational programs

and consulting teams, his experience ranges from leading a highly

successful business turnaround in Investment Banking, leading a large

safety portfolio through a material reduction in injury rates and key

post-merger integration functions.  He has led professional services

teams of nearly 100 and operational teams of over 600 while consistently

achieving top employee engagement scores.  He is a highly sought after

public speaker, conference chair and Executive speaker on the global

scene and has received several international awards both personally and

for the teams he has led including Top Global Deployment Leader in

Process Excellence (2012), Top 10 Best Places to Work in Process

Excellence (2010), Honourable Mention for Best Process Excellence

Deployment (2013). Eric can be found at EricMichrowski.com.Lean Engagement Team (More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible.Lean Sales and Marketing: Learn about using CAP-Do

“In the early 1980s, Caterpillar, Inc. lost one million dollars per day for 3 consecutive years. Its continuing existence came into question. Today, CAT is the world’s most profitable manufacturer of construction and mining equipment and large engines. The now legendary global company made numerous well-calculated , though risky decisions for three consecutive decades in the process scaling to heights unimaginable to even the finest business enterprises.” – From the Book jacket

How did they do it? The Caterpillar Way

Craig Bouchard, author of the book The Caterpillar Way: Lessons in Leadership, Growth, and Shareholder Value, discusses how CAT got it right in this Business901 podcast. Craig is an entrepreneur, writer, art collector, great father and pretty good husband. He  crafted the first and only “hostile reverse tender merger” ever successfully completed on Wall St and founded two public companies; Esmark and Shale-Inland. He can be found at http://www.craigbouchard.com.

Making products fly involves more than just the development team. So how do

we involve, interact and improve with the non software parts of the value chain?

Let Mattias Skarin walk through lean techniques and thinking that helps drive

improvements across organizational borders.  Mattius is one of thought leaders

of the Kanban Movement and is speaking at the upcoming Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference (It is

in Hamburg, Germany, Nov 4-5, 2013). He is speaking about: Improving the full value

chain & Visualization

– What‘s my brain got to do with it? (Lightning Talk)

Mattias Skarin works as a Lean and Kanban coach, building systems that

enables you to cut time to market and improve quality. He has helped several

software teams deliver with confidence, scaled Scrum over multiple teams

(cutting game cycle time from 24 months to 4) and improved life at operations

using Kanban. He is an author of the book, Kanban

and Scrum – making the most of both, and regularly train and coach in Lean,

Kanban and TDD. He blogs on http://blog.crisp.se/mattiasskarin

and the blog has one of the best set of sample Kanban boards on the

planet.

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