How to Align Strategy, Culture, Customer Experience & Success
Bloomington, February 25-26, 2016

Costs as low as $499/ticket for member, groups. For pricing information or to register visit here.

SUMMARY

This workshop provides a powerful, elegantly simple framework with new tools for dramatically improving organizational performance and customer success. The content integrates and transcends practices such as Lean, Six Sigma, Voice of Customer, ISO 9000, Baldrige National Award Criteria and related methods. Your award-winning instructor and best-selling author, Robin Lawton, uses an interactive, jargon-free style to deliver the innovative new mindset and tools that are perfectly suited to everyone in a knowledge-intensive enterprise. You will see significant results others have achieved rapidly, helping you apply insights and content to your own situation during the session.

Change leaders like you have high expectations, a vision of the possible and urgency to engage others. Join this stimulating and entertaining session for a pragmatic approach that will strengthen your ability to achieve strategic outcomes, convert customers to fans and engage employees. Come with a team and leave with an action plan you can immediately begin to communicate and deploy. Get enlightened, inspired and equipped for results!

How would you feel to discover your car engine was only running on one or two of its eight cylinders? Whether your “car” is an organization or a key initiative, you wouldn’t knowingly continue to drive it that way. This course will equip you to get all 8 cylinders working together like you never thought possible. Here is what others said:

“Excellent program! This is not ‘soft’ training but challenged me to make a mind shift to apply the customer-centered thinking in my work. The emphasis on creative, divergent thinking may be the key to our success in the next ten years.” Steve McAlexander, AVP, American Honda Motor

“I want to be sure you heard from me what a critical piece of work we all did during your session last week. We are already beginning to incorporate the thinking in your model into our efforts in the Mental Health Service. Thanks so much for a superlative seminar.” Rich Goepfert, East Region Chief, Mental Health Services Group Health Cooperative, Puget Sound

 

“I have attended more than twenty seminars, workshops and post-Masters degree courses related to customer focus. This is the most practical approach I have found.” Clifford Keys, Operations Division Manager Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

 

“This is definitely NOT for the faint-hearted! [We were] led through an intensive, fast-paced presentation designed to reframe how we think about customer experience. Each participant was continually challenged to think about ‘products’ [rather than service activity] and our role in providing these to our real customers.” Hazel Mays, Quality Manager, AT&T Global Business Communications Systems

OBJECTIVES: You will learn how to…

1. Use new tools to connect strategy, daily work and customer insight
2. Make the most intangible knowledge work concrete, measurable, repeatable by design
3. Move from an internal, process-out focus toward an outcome-in culture of excellence
4. Determine who “the customer” really is in every context and why it matters
5. Uncover, translate, design for and satisfy the Voice of the Customer
6. Objectively measure seemingly squishy and immeasurable customer perceptions
7. Use a critical, unrecognized societal and demographic change to achieve leadership
8. Inject existing initiatives with a strong customer bias, strengthening what you do well
9. Identify and use 6 levers of cultural change that can otherwise cause defeat or delay
10. Use a new method to rapidly identify and cut over 50% of process time, cost and waste
11. Apply insights Steve Jobs, Herb Kelleher, Patch Adams, Jeff Bezos & others mastered
12. Strengthen the four dimensions most performance measurement systems miss
13. Prioritize and frame projects for optimum initiative and strategic success
14. Avoid surveys that ask the wrong questions of the wrong people, creating distraction
15. Assure any improvement effort yields at least a 5:1 return on effort

 

OUTLINE

Day 1

1. The 8 Dimensions of Excellence framework

• Self-assessment: your strengths on customer knowledge, strategy and improvement
• Balancing customer and producer priorities
• Separating process, product and outcome expectations
• Aligning mission, strategy, measures, customer values, behavior: Roadmap & steps
• Ambiguity and use of six levers for your own leadership and cultural transformation
• Vital Lies: constraints on excellence

1. Redefining Knowledge and Work as Products

• Four key questions that advance traditional management of excellence and quality
• The remedy for the six reasons service is so difficult to define, manage and improve
• How to define “service” and knowledge work as measurable products
• Connecting strategic direction to daily work, relevant to everyone
• 1969 and the #1 characteristic driving enterprise growth (think Steve Jobs)
• The fastest growing product category you could be in (but probably aren’t yet)
• The key things we should know (but few do) about every product
• Identifying the “root cause” of failure and success: A $20 million case study

1. Laser Focus on the Customer

• Unambiguously determining who “the customer” is in every context
• Differentiating the three roles a customer can play, and why it matters
• Enhancing success by empowering the right customers
• What we should learn from Jimmy Carter and Elon Musk

1. Summary of Day 1, case study for reference, morning assignment

 

Day 2

1. Integrating The Voice-of-Customer, Innovation and Great Design

• Ten reasons surveys fail and how to improve success
• The “word formula” questions that always uncover what customers want
• How to separate the 12 critically different customer voices
• Balancing competing interests for a win-win
• Convergent versus divergent thinking: Why GE never made candles
• Using the Innovation Roadmap to drive WOW!

1. Measuring the Seemingly Immeasurable, With & Without Surveys

• Why and what to measure while avoiding overkill
• How to translate squishy perceptions into objective measures
• Building the product/service design table

1. Rethinking process

• The two processes to keep in mind as separate
• Activity versus product flow
• The minimum six measures to know and report on every target process

1. Connecting the Dots and Taking Action

• Deployment with high potential, high readiness, high visibility
• Heroes, not martyrs
• Leadership’s role and the action plan

RESULTS

Users of the 8 Dimensions framework and underlying Customer-Centered Culture (C3) system of tools have achieved impressive successes as a direct result, many within only two years of initial deployment, such as the following examples:

HEALTHCARE

• Improved healthy cardiac discharge rates in 50% less time by engaging patients in a new way.
• More than tripled the participation rate in wellness programs, uncovering unintended disincentives that were actually offending some of those most wanted as participants.
• Improved both patient and professional satisfaction in multiple clinical contexts.

INDUSTRY

• Increased monthly revenue by $8 million during the first six months, primarily by asking customers new questions along the lines of the C3 “word formulas” and establishing new performance measures.
• Saved $18 million in procurement process costs in a high technology company.
• Increased sales productivity by over 40%.
• Achieved the highest project success rate in company history.
• Repeatedly reduced customer-experienced response times by over 80%.
• Achieved Malcolm Baldrige National Award wins and comparable recognition within two years of initiation.
• Won best-in-class industry rank in customer satisfaction (autos, airlines, utilities).

GOVERNMENT

• Improved agency ranking from 25^th to 1^st of 50 states, as judged by Governing Magazine.
• Saved taxpayers $20 million in 18 months, contributing to Governor’s reelection.
• Won top placement in annual international team competition, besting teams from Fortune 100 firms.
• Shortened customer response times by 90%, affecting over 20% of adult citizens.
• Won awards for excellence by major Federal agencies and state governors.

 

INTENDED AUDIENCE

This workshop is for change leaders, initiative champions and their teams responsible for conceiving and executing top-flight performance improvement and innovation your customers and colleagues will notice, love and emulate.

 

TOOLS YOU’LL TAKE AWAY INCLUDE

• A self-assessment revealing excellence strengths/needs in four key areas of leadership
• The easy-to-apply framework showing where your current initiatives really focus and what actions will leverage them
• A tool that removes “service” ambiguity, making intangible work concrete and measurable
• Project criteria shown to increase satisfaction & workforce capacity, saving cost and time
• An easy to understand, step-by-step method for defining what your customers want
• An Excellence Framework that balances customer and enterprise values
• Tools to (a) differentiate 3 roles a customer can play in any context, (b) discover whether the customers with most power have it appropriately, (c) identify the priorities that are/aren’t measured.
• The method for connecting strategy to daily work, applicable to everyone

 

Costs as low as $499/ticket for member, groups. For pricing information or to register visit here.

 

PRESENTER

Robin Lawton, president of International Management Technologies, Inc. (IMT), is a best-selling author and internationally recognized expert in creating rapid strategic alignment between enterprise objectives and customer priorities.   Rob has over 30 years’ experience directing both strategic and operational improvement initiatives in industry, healthcare, government, education and international enterprises. His powerful but easy-to-understand principles and tools are outlined in his 5-star rated book (see Amazon.com), Creating a Customer-Centered Culture: Leadership in Quality, Innovation and Speed (Quality Press). Some of his other books and articles are described at www.imtC3.com and www.amazon.com .

Mr. Lawton has been recognized for making profound contributions, equivalent to those of Dr. Edwards Deming, to leadership practices. Dr. Deming became well-known in the last century for his management principles and process improvement methods, particularly well-suited for industrial age enterprises. Mr. Lawton’s work has similar importance for the service and knowledge-intensive enterprise of the 21^st century, with special focus on new ways for understanding the voice of the customer and translating them into satisfying, innovative products and services that strengthen the enterprise’s mission, strategic objectives and daily work.

His North American clients include AT&T, American Honda, Motorola, Siemens, Raytheon, GE, Liebherr Mining Equipment, General Mills, American Express, Ford, Imperial Oil, Eastman Kodak, U.S. Department of Defense, Mayo Clinic, Group Health Cooperative, Capital One, Wolters Kluwer Health Pharma, California State University, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Discover Card and many others. Clients from government include agencies from Alaska to Vermont. Mr. Lawton also has numerous international clients from many industries and has been published in several countries.

Rob is a thought-leading, humorous and engaging speaker. He has been ranked #1 of 88 speakers by an international organization and is regularly ranked “Best Speaker” at major conferences such as those sponsored by Chamber of Commerce, Japan Management Association, American Management Association, American Quality Institute, International ISO Conference, Minnesota Healthcare Association, American Society for Quality (ASQ), Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) and others.

Costs as low as $499/ticket for member, groups. For pricing information or to register visit here.

Please contact Rob for information on public or in-house versions of this program:

Email: [email protected]        Phone: 941-704-9888