LeanKanban

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Magic leadership video now live!

Kanban University has posted the video of my keynote, The Lost Arts of Leadership, and How to Get Them Back, from the Kanban Global Summit in San Diego in August.

Finally, the secret to great leadership is revealed. Shutterstock image.

A couple of points:

  • The speaker’s rostrum was on a platform about 18″ above the floor, and the audience was seated pretty close to it. It made for a dynamic speaking experience, but it also explains why I seem to be bent over a lot.
  • The presentation has several animations which in the interests of readability, the version that accompanies my video doesn’t capture. If you’d like to see them, please download the PDF edition on our Articles page (each stage of a build is a separate slide). Also, I’m using an Apple Pencil to underline, circle, draw arrows and the like. You’ll have to infer these.

There were a lot of interesting presentations. You can view them all on their Conference Archive and their YouTube channel. And don’t forget the helpful and entertaining set of annotations!

Enjoy!!

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New course on implementation from LeanKanban University

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.

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Fit for success

Fit for Purpose: How modern businesses find, satisfy, and keep customers
David J Anderson and Alexei Zheglov
To be released by Amazon on November 29, 2017

Fit for PurposeWhen I first read the title “Fit for Purpose,” it seemed a little passive. Something like “meets specs,” which is necessary but suggests that somebody else is driving the market. I don’t know Alexei personally, but David is the founder and chairman of Lean Kanban, Inc., which provides training and consulting in “Lean Kanban” and related management tools based on a philosophy similar to Boyd’s. I’ve spoken at several of their events and keynoted Lean Kanban Central Europe 2015. (The charts and a related paper are available from the Articles page, link above).

But when I got deeper into Anderson & Zheglov’s book, it became clear that although their methods would certainly help developers meet specs, “purpose” could be something much more active and powerful.

Developers, whether of software, cars, or airplanes, occasionally forget that the real purpose of their efforts is to produce something that will delight their customers so much that they come back for more, and tell their friends, family, and colleagues. So David and Alexei subtitled their book not “Better ways to develop widgets,” or some such, but “How modern businesses find, satisfy, and keep customers.” As they insist, the only “purpose” that counts is the customer’s:

Before you can evaluate whether your products or services are fit-for-purpose, you need to be able to identify your customer’s purpose.

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