Many organizations have found it difficult to transfer the Voice of the Customer methods and technologies developed for manufacturing quality and apply them to knowledge and service work. This how-to guide makes it easier! Lawton challenges the traditional thinking about quality and service and provides approaches for integrating the two into a plan that works. Covers successfully applying formal quality management methods--from Taguchi, Deming, and others--to the service enterprise.

Creating a Customer-Centered Culture: Leadership in Quality, Innovation, and Speed

Business & Money

Lawton, Robin L.

Management & Leadership

Asq Pr

What separates excellent organizations from the truly ordinary? What allows some organizations to rapidly change and continually reinvent themselves while others have trouble making even modest improvements? The fundamental ingredient is the presence of change agents. Change agents are individuals who have the knowledge, skills, and tools to help organizations create radical improvement. They achieve results through their keen ability to facilitate groups of people through well-defined processes to develop, organize, and sell new ideas. They are the invisible hands that turn vision into action. 
The Change Agent's Guide to Radical Improvement is a comprehensive how-to book, packed with all of the information and tools necessary to make any improvement project a rousing success. Its unique methods integrate the best practices in organizational development, team building, voice of the customer, reengineering, problem solving, creativity, innovation, and project management. 
The systematic change agent model introduced in this book will help you: 
* Pick the right improvement projects to work on, by diagnosing the real issues effecting the organization. * Organize the project so that it has the best chance to succeed, by uncovering the project's success criteria, securing management support, and building the right team. * Select the best change process to improve customer satisfaction, reengineer a process, solve a problem or develop a plan. * Generate innovative out of the box ideas that dramatically impact the bottom line. * Navigate the politics of change; ensuring radical ideas become radical improvements.

The Change Agent's Guide to Radical Improvement

Miller, Ken

Processes & Infrastructure

This book is for leaders with high expectations, a vision of the possible, urgency to engage employees and impatience for results that improve the lives of many others. If you are looking for the road map to dramatic success, this is it. Mastering Excellence provides you with a new way to think about work and customers, an elegantly simple framework and tools you can immediately apply to transform your organization and your role in it. Based on the author’s 30 years of work with organizations of all kinds and sizes, including multi-nationals, small start-ups, government agencies, healthcare, education and defense, you get an engaging and practical speedway to dramatic change you would not think possible. There are many approaches to change. Most emphasize process improvement. They use tools that are mathematical, analytical and operational in nature and assume that the absence of things gone wrong is equivalent to achieving excellence. That focuses on minimums, not optimums. Virtually none provides an integrated strategic system that begins with articulating purpose from the customer’s perspective, uses linguistics to reveal and destroy the ambiguities we allow to persist, and redefines knowledge and service work in tangible, countable ways we can design for excellence. This book does that and far more.As the CEO, executive change leader or consultant to leadership, you want customers that are enthused, employees that are engaged and fast, highly visible results. Eye-popping savings, customer wait times cut by 90%, strong revenue growth and an avalanche of customer kudos are the kinds of sustainable and continuing results many Masters of Excellence have achieved. This provides the means and rewires your brain to understand how.Ambiguity, Vital Lies, complexity and the fragmented pursuit of excellence are hidden barriers this book systematically destroys. The reader’s mind gets rewired in surprising ways, enabling clarity of thought and purpose that is easily tied to deployment. Practical application reinforces and makes memorable every key idea. Many examples are paired with how-to’s the reader can immediately apply.Robin Lawton follows his first book, 5-star ranked on Amazon, with MASTERING EXCELLENCE. This engaging, practical and thought-leading read is for leaders seeking a strategic systems approach to customer-centered organizational transformation.

Mastering Excellence: A Leader's Guide to Aligning Strategy, Culture, Customer Experience & Measures of Success

C3 Excellence

This book is an extended version of Mastering Excellence, intended ONLY for participants of the author's workshops. Several of those are described on the C3Excellence.com website and include Mastering 8 Dimensions of Excellence. Related workshop topics address Voice of the Customer, Strategic Project Management, Product Design and Innovation, Strategic Planning, and Process Transformation for Zero Cycle Time.

Mastering Excellence Special Edition: A Leader's Guide to Aligning Strategy, Culture, Customer Experinece & Measures of Success

C3 Excellence Publishing

MASTERING EXCELLENCE is for leaders with high expectations, a vision of the possible and urgency to improve the lives of many others. Robin Lawton provides you with a new way to think about work and customers, and an elegantly simple framework with tools you can immediately apply to transform your organization and your role in it. Based on the author’s 30 years of work with organizations of all kinds and sizes, including multi-nationals, small start-ups, government agencies, healthcare, education and defense, you get an engaging and practical road map to dramatic change you would not think possible. There are many approaches to change. Most emphasize process improvement. They use tools that are statistical, analytical and operational in nature and assume that the absence of things gone wrong is equivalent to achieving excellence. That focuses on minimums, not optimums; compliance and consistency, not aspiration and possibility. Virtually none provides an integrated strategic system that begins with articulating purpose from the customer’s perspective, uses linguistics to reveal and destroy the communication ambiguities we allow to persist, and redefines knowledge and service work in tangible, countable ways we can employ for creating excellence by design. This book, including more than twenty Leader’s Actions exercises, does that and far more.As the CEO, executive change leader or consultant to leadership, you want customers that are enthused, employees that are engaged and fast, highly visible results that are sustainable. Eye-popping savings in the millions of dollars, customer wait times cut by 90%, strong revenue growth and an avalanche of customer kudos are the kinds of continuing results many Masters of Excellence have achieved. This material rewires your brain to understand how and your role in leading outstanding success.Expect this book to enable you to:•Transform your organization (for profit or not) from customer-desred outcomes inward•Use six levers (language, measures, values, power, assumptions and modeling) to eliminate ambiguity•Translate abstract vision, values and mission into concrete, deployable daily work•Redefine all knowledge and service work as tangible, measurable products•Determine the only three roles customers can play and minimize bias favoring the wrong customers•Engage and impassion employees to create unsurpassed customer success•Create an enviable reality for your enterprise and your role in it

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