Home Authors Posts by Joseph Dager

Joseph Dager

Joseph Dager
Business901 is a firm specializing in bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and marketing arena. He has authored the books the Lean Marketing House, Marketing with A3 and Marketing with PDCA. The Business901 Blog and Podcast includes many leading edge thinkers and has been featured numerous times for its contributions to the Bloomberg's Business Week Exchange.

Value Streams Focus On The More Formal Deliverables

What would Dr. Deming Say? Dr. W. Edwards Deming advised us that a supplier is a partner and our relationships must be based on...

Standardize Your Tools and Leave Your People Be Creative with Them

There seems to be as many maps in the Service Design world as there is time in the Lean world. Service Design has a...

Process Maps, Value Maps and More Maps

Value Stream Mapping is a process most consider an exercise for finding and removing waste. It is a foundational Lean Tool that typically gets...

Value Stream Mapping: The Assessment and Planning Tool of Lean Practitioners

In the book,Value Stream Mapping for Lean Development: A How-To Guide for Streamlining Time to Market, Drew Locher explained how to create a Future...

Don’t Start a Value Stream Mapping Process Trying to Solve a Problem!

Don’t start a Value Stream Mapping (VSM) process trying to solve a problem! Start the process trying to identify the process. You probably know...

The Tool of Value Stream Mapping

When beginning with Lean most of us immediately delve into Value Stream Mapping (VSM) thinking this process alone will make us Lean. It is...

Ramblings on Lean Product Development and Design

So what has happened to Lean Product Development and Lean Design? I had mentioned Allen Ward previously and his pioneering work in the area...

Should Learning Cycles Replace Stage Gates

The differences in Design between Lean and Six Sigma are not in the tools that they use but in the paths, they have chosen...

Your Ability to Succeed Comes Down to How Good of a Team You Put Together

I think a Kaizen Event  offers leadership a unique opportunity to “walk the talk.” They can participate in open and frank conversation, promote empowerment...

The Team is Not Responsible for Teamwork

Successful Lean teams are iTeams When I use this term, it is based on a simple theory that Teamwork Is an Individual Skill. In this...

Applying Standard Work to Sales and Marketing

People struggle with Lean in knowledge work, services, sales and marketing because they don’t believe that many of the fundamental concepts of Lean, such...

Behavior is the Unknowable Variable in Every Innovation

“Companies are not so much in the business of what we buy, but the way we act.” – Thomas Koulopoulos Behavior is the unknowable variable...

Prototypes provide a Pathway for Connecting with Customers

Prototypes provide a Pathway for Connecting with Customers 0 Prototyping is a way to introduce our products or services in a very disarming way. It...

If You Want to Invent a Better Shovel, Start Shoveling!

This is the Idea (Ideate) stage, the fun part. We get out a bunch of post-it-notes, colored pencils and leave our creativity loose. Or...

Empathy is at the Heart of Design

The difference between the thought process embedded in EDCA (Service Design) and the other disciplines of Lean can be summed up in one word:...

Evolution and the Future of PDCA

In the paper, Evolution of PDCA, covered the development of PDCA from the introduction to the scientific method (you could argue between Aristotle or...

Standard Work is Driven by Customers

Lean has reacted and supported the improvement of services through the foundation based on Deming’s 14 Points Applied to Services (Quality and Reliability). In...

Establishing Pull in Lean

After you create flow, the next Lean step is to establish pull. This is not any more difficult than the other Lean steps but...

Map the Value Stream

When people hear the term “Map the Value Stream,” their thoughts often go to the Value Stream Mapping (VSM) Process. Value Stream Mapping as...

Identifying Value With Lean

Identifying Value With Lean 0 Lean is based on the creation of perfect value for the customer. It is said to be Lean’s core objective....

New Posts