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Strategy and Tools for Transformation Leaders

Align strategy, culture, customer experience, human performance and success

 

 

The Strategy and Tools for Transformation Leaders workshop is designed to make your transformational efforts much easier, faster, and more impactful than anything you’ve seen or experienced. It will benefit change leaders in all knowledge-intensive organizations.

It is normal to attack single symptoms of organizational under-performance as if they are the root causes preventing excellence.  Themes such as process improvement, employee engagement, service responsiveness, waste and cost reduction, technology adoption, and performance measurement masquerade as the cure.  As an insightful leader, you recognize the true pursuit of excellence is multi-dimensional, constrained by organizational culture, and is a highly complex endeavor.

The new leader is impatient to achieve “impossible” outcomes, excite customers, engage empowered employees and set new measures of success others can only dream about.  It is a tall order requiring an entirely new focus, paradigm and tools.  Success requires a transformation system as well as a systems approach to transformation.  This workshop provides you with both. It starts with transforming how you envision excellence, then equips you to achieve what you never thought possible, such as these repeated practitioner results:

  • New monthly revenue of $8 million
  • Process time reductions of 80%
  • Cost savings of $20 million in two years
  • Customers transformed into raving fans
  • Dramatic improvement in employee selection, placement, performance
  • Measurement of intangible knowledge work across the enterprise
  • National & industry awards for excellence and best-in-class performance
  • Engaged employees who view their work as a calling, not a job

Educational units (REUs) are available for ASQ members

Strategy and Tools for Transformation Leaders Takeaways Include

  • Mastering Excellence: A Leader’s Guide to Aligning Strategy, Culture, Customer Experience and Measures of Success
  • A cultural IQ assessment revealing excellence strengths/needs in four key areas of leadership
  • Tools to apply the new transformation system, unavailable elsewhere
  • * The Strategy Map for connecting strategy to daily work, applicable to everyone
  • 10 Steps to Excellence: Your road map to success
  • Six Leadership Levers: Eliminate the sources of ambiguity, confusion, chaos and conflict; simplify and accelerate cultural change
  • 8 Dimensions of Excellence framework that integrates and balances priorities related to initiatives, measures, strategy, operations and values
  • A tool eliminating “poor service”, making intangible work concrete & measurable
  • * Strategic Project criteria shown to increase satisfaction & workforce effectiveness
  • * A Voice of the Customer methodology that is easy, powerful, and unique
  • * The new tools for mapping, analyzing and improving any process by 80%

* Included in sessions over 1 day in length

Strategy and Tools for Transformation Leaders Learning Objectives

You will learn how to…

  1. Innovatively connect strategy, business growth, operations, and customer insight
  2. * Inject initiatives such as Lean, Six Sigma, design thinking, and operational excellence with a strong customer bias that fundamentally changes behavior
  3. Make intangible knowledge and service work concrete, measurable, repeatable
  4. * Align measurement to address eight dimensions of excellence others miss
  5. Determine who “the customer” really is in every context and why it matters
  6. Apply insights mastered and practiced by today’s thought leaders
  7. Engage employees, using a logical process to release their creative energies
  8. * Use 6 Levers to eliminate the #1 cause of confusion, conflict, chaos, low productivity, and initiative under-performance
  9. * Assure any improvement effort yields at least a 5:1 return on effort
  10. * Uncover, translate, and satisfy the Voice of the Customer (without surveys)
  11. Objectively measure seemingly squishy and immeasurable customer perceptions
  12. Select and define projects for optimum strategic success; eliminate scope creep
  13. Use a new method to rapidly cut 80% of process time, cost, waste, complexity
  14. Develop a rapid deployment plan that is high impact, scalable, and sustainable

* Included in sessions over 1 day in length

Strategy and Tools for Transformation Leaders Outline

Day 1

1. The 8 Dimensions of Excellence framework

  • Self-assessment: your strengths on customer knowledge, strategy and improvement
  • Separating and prioritizing 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
  • How to advance your current initiative(s), such as Lean Six Sigma, MBNA criteria, ISO 9001 and other approaches
  • Vital Lies: constraints on excellence

2. Redefining Knowledge and Service Work as Products

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

3. * Putting Operational Excellence and Lean on Steroids

  • How to cut 90% of your process mapping effort
  • The #1 source of waste, unaddressed by almost all Lean initiatives
  • The fast, easy way to identify the true root cause of all process problems
  • How to assure Lean and process improvement impacts customer experience
  • The new tool to impact eight (8) measures of process performance

4. Laser Focus on the Customer (including employee customers)

  • 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 Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, others

5. * Connections between employees, teams, and workforce performance

  • The keys to creating high-impact strategic projects without scope creep
  • Eliminate the single practice most hated by bosses and employees
  • The high performance team
  • How leaders of HR, Quality, IT, and Customer Service can excel

6. 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 and balance the 12 critically different customer voices
  • Convergent versus divergent thinking: Why GE never made candles
  • Innovation and design thinking to drive WOW!

2. * 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

3. * Rethinking process

  • The two processes to keep in mind as separate
  • Activity versus product flow
  • How to cut time, complexity, cost, and dissatisfaction by 80%
  • The minimum six measures to know and report on every target process

4. Connecting the Dots and Taking Action

  • Deployment with high potential, high readiness, high visibility
  • Heroes, not martyrs

* Included in sessions over 1 day in length

The length of the session determines the depth of material covered and the amount of hands-on application time.

  • Live in-house workshops (customized to the client’s special objectives and circumstances):  1 to 3 days
  • Public workshops:  1/2 to 3 days
  • Executive seminars and dinner lectures:  90-120 minutes
  • Interactive webinars:  2-4 hours

 

Strategy and Tools for Transformation Leaders Intended Audience

This workshop is for members of the C-suite, change leaders, initiative champions and their teams responsible for conceiving and executing top-flight performance improvement and innovation your colleagues, customers and employees will notice, love and emulate. Leaders from all disciplines including quality management, operations, human resources, IT, customer service, marketing, and supply management will benefit.

Webinar Summary

This 3.5-hour interactive webinar is a modified version of essential elements of the full-length workshop. It is designed to make your transformational efforts much easier, faster, and more impactful than anything you’ve seen or experienced. It is based on a brand new way of thinking, new tools, and a proven track record of stunning results.  It will benefit change leaders in all knowledge-intensive organizations.

The new leader is impatient to achieve “impossible” outcomes, excite customers, engage empowered employees and set new measures of success others can only dream about.  It is a tall order requiring an entirely new focus, paradigm and tools.  Success requires a transformation system as well as a systems approach to transformation.  This fast-paced webinar provides you with both. It starts with transforming how you envision excellence, then equips you to achieve what you never thought possible.  Optional C3 Mentoring is available to support your deployment.

Please see the full-length workshop tabs for Intended Audience, Outline and Takeaways for reference, omitting asterisked items, as directed.

Objectives

In only a half-day, you will learn how to:

  1. Apply an innovative roadmap to connect strategy, business growth, operations, and customer insight
  2. Totally rethink the way work is done and transformation should occur so customer focus is embedded everywhere, from strategy to daily work
  3. Make intangible knowledge and service work concrete and measurable
  4. Determine who “the customer” really is in every context and why it matters
  5. Engage employees, using a logical process that releases creativity
  6. Eliminate the #1 cause of confusion, conflict, chaos, low productivity, and initiative under-performance
  7. Focus projects for optimum strategic success, selecting the right targets
  8. Use a new method to cut 80% of process time, cost, waste, complexity
  9. Develop a rapid deployment plan that is high impact, scalable, and sustainable

A Few Practitioner Results

  • New monthly revenue of $8 million
  • Process time reductions of 80%
  • Cost savings of $20 million in two years
  • Customers transformed into raving fans
  • National & industry awards for excellence and best-in-class performance
  • Engaged employees who view their work as a calling, not a job

Sample Participant Comments

“This is the most clear and direct method of leadership improvement and quality management I have found.” Quentin Wilson, Director, Department of Revenue, Winner, Missouri State Level Baldrige Award (1st state agency in the country)

 

“In comparison with giants of the past such as Deming, Drucker, Ackoff, Peters, and Juran, Mr. Lawton is clearly today’s premier thinker and practitioner of excellence, as defined by customers. He causes revolutionary new managerial thinking and decision-making.”  Dr. Bruce Laviolette, Corporate Director of Management Systems, Naval Air Systems Command

Click here to REGISTER

Educational units (REUs) are available for ASQ members