LeanKanban University has announced their newest course, Fit for Purpose, based on the book co-authored  by David J. Anderson.  The announcement describes the course this way:

This 2-day class will offer you significant new insights into how to optimize the effectiveness of your business, to produce fit-for-purpose products and services that delight your customers, making them loyal to your brand and increasing your share, revenues and margins, and to evaluate depth of Kanban implementations.

In Boyd’s terminology, “delight your customers, making them loyal to your brand and increasing your share, revenues and margins” is the Schwerpunkt. Everything else you do must support this objective, because if you can’t do this, then everything else you do is waste.

The philosophy of Fit for Purpose rests on the same foundation as other “lean” methodologies, such as the Toyota Production and Development Systems, and, for that matter, as the USMC doctrine of maneuver warfare (a subject I treat in some detail in Certain to Win).  This foundation sometimes goes by the acronym “EBFAS,” which is somewhat explained in an earlier post.  It turns out that companies that use this foundation — whether they got the ideas from Boyd or from other authors (e.g., Stalk & Hout, Tom Peters, Stephen Bungay) or discovered them on their own (Toyota & probably Apple) — have extraordinary capabilities to delight customers and so shape the marketplace.

I should confess to being less than unbiased.  I know David Anderson, have taught in a couple of his courses, reviewed the book Fit for Purpose, and am mentioned in it. Even so, I highly recommend this course no matter what field or industry you’re in.  It’s probably as close to a Boyd Symposium as we’ll get this year.

LeanKanban University has announced four sessions of Fit for Purpose during the first half of the year: February 25-26 and May 23-24 in Bilbao, Spain, April 8-9 in Hamburg, and May 20-21 in Seattle. Here’s a link to the schedule for all their leadership / management courses.