Leadership in Excellence and Customer Focus October 16 – 17, 2012 in Memphis, TN A new two-day course featuring two topics

Day One ACHIEVING 8 DIMENSIONS OF EXCELLENCE: Aligning Strategy and Measures with Customer Priorities Change leaders like you have high expectations, a vision of the possible, and urgency to engage others. Join this stimulating and entertaining session for a pragmatic approach that will strengthen your ability to achieve strategic outcomes that customers will notice and employees will deploy with enthusiasm. Top-rated speaker and author Robin Lawton provides a thought-leading model and new tools for an eminently practical way to:

You will be equipped with a powerful but elegantly simple framework and process that has consistently produced high results in the toughest settings. Examples illustrate what a well-aligned strategic plan, balanced scorecard, and customer-centered change initiative looks like as applied in government, healthcare, and industry. Executives or change leaders will also see how to remedy common obstacles that may be interfering with their organization’s customer-centeredness:

1. Describe customer priorities along four main dimensions.

• Internal focus: process improvement without first defining and measuring customer-desired outcomes

2. Concretely connect the four main dimensions to enterprise mission and strategy. 3. Balance eight areas of performance and related measures.

• No consensus: confusion about what “service” means and who “the customer” really is

4. Integrate and leverage existing initiatives (Baldrige, GPRA, Lean/Six Sigma, HCAHPS, and VoC).

• Intent without method: desire to understand the voice of the customer with only ad-hoc methods

OBJECTIVES:

• Complexity: tools developed for manufacturing operations are difficult to apply to service and knowledge work

This fast-paced, interactive session shows you how to:

1. Make the most intangible knowledge work concrete and measurable.

• Initiative proliferation: so much to do, we forget what the goal is

2. Use new tools to connect strategy, daily work, and customer insight.

• Measurement imbalance: excess focus on what we and third parties care about, and little focus on customers’ priorities

3. Determine who “the customer” really is (beyond labels like buyers, taxpayers, patients, etc.).

• Activity-oriented strategic plans: meeting milestones is confused with achieving results

4. Move from an internal process focus toward a culture where customer-desired outcomes drive innovation and excellence.

• Execution weakness: stops, starts, and changes in deployment delay getting to “done”

5. Inject existing initiatives with a strong customer bias; strengthen what you already do well.

TOOLS YOU’LL TAKE AWAY INCLUDE:

6. Address four key performance areas most scorecards miss. 7. Ensure any improvement effort yields at least a 5:1 return on effort.

“I have attended more than 20 seminars, workshops, and postmaster’s degree courses related to customer focus. This is the most practical approach I have found.”

• A self-assessment that reveals excellence strengths/needs in four key areas of leadership • The easy-to-apply framework that shows where your current initiatives really focus and what actions will leverage them • The tool that removes ambiguity about what “service” means, making the most intangible work concrete and measurable • Project criteria shown to simultaneously increase satisfaction and workforce capacity while making huge cost and time savings • The method for connecting strategy to daily work, making it applicable to everyone

Clifford Keys, Operations Division Manager, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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Day One AGENDA: 8 Dimensions of Excellence, including:

• Assessing your strengths on customer knowledge, strategy, and improvement • Customer-centered priorities at four strategic and tactical points • Producer-centered priorities, where most change efforts focus • Separating process, product, and outcome expectations • Aligning mission, strategy, values, and behavior with customer values • Case study: How a strategic plan-measures-responsibility map is structured for focus and “deployability” • Application tools: customer-centered culture assessment and the customer-desired 5 Whys

Strategic Direction and Performance Measurement • How to define strategic outcomes customers want • Connecting strategic goals to daily work • The customer-balanced scorecard and key performance measures

“It is funny that, instead of the C3/8D ideas slowly fading away as often can happen after a course, they are making more and more sense. You have essentially changed the whole way I approach everything I do, and I am enjoying my job more as a result.”  Stephanie Easthope, Manager, Operational Excellence, Wolters Kluwer Health, Pharma Solutions

Connecting the Dots and Taking Action • Nine steps to alignment with customer priorities • Improving the right things—not necessarily the lowhanging fruit • Case study in success and over 20-to-1 ROI • Application tools: target product selection

• Vital lies to spot and crush • Application tools: organization and customer outcomes

Redefining Service and Knowledge as Products • The six reasons service is so difficult to define, manage, and improve • The secret to defining intangible knowledge work as measurable products • The fastest growing product category you could be in (but probably aren’t yet) • Laser focus on the right customer: three customer roles • Strengthening your strategic initiative by empowering the right customers • Application tools: service redefinition, customer roles, and power

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Day Two Mind & VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER: Uncover, translate, balance and deliver what customers want (VOC)

(Achieving 8 Dimensions of Excellence is a prerequisite for this session) You’d never tolerate multiple answers to the math problem 7+5=X. We’ve had years of math training, but little or none in linguistics. The ambiguity of our language and weak linguistic discipline remains a largely untouched challenge. This course supplies the needed rigor in a way that is easy to apply. You’ll see how both improvement and innovation opportunities become unavoidably obvious. Now more than ever, success in challenging times is dependent on understanding and delivering what customers want. However, the well-meaning notion that we should listen to “the voice of the customer” is an insult to our intelligence. Everyone knows there is no such thing as the customer. This necessarily means there must be more than one voice to listen to. Yet we can make potentially fatal assumptions about (1) who “the customers” really are, (2) what questions to ask, (3) how to prioritize their answers, and (4) how to define and measure success. Your organization is not alone in this challenge. Consider the top car company executive who heard customers say they wanted more miles per tank of gas. Did this understanding lead to (a) fuel-efficient engines, (b) lighter vehicles, (c) aerodynamic bodies, or (d) bigger gas tanks? The firm’s design team rushed to market with bigger gas tanks!

OBJECTIVES: Don’t even think about conducting a voice of the customer project, commissioning a customer survey, or designing new services without the innovative framework and tools provided in this session. You’ll learn a refreshing new way to uncover and translate the mind of the customer in ways you never thought possible, including how to: • Create the strategic framework for your VoC initiative • Compare the seven most common ways to collect customer needs • Avoid the 10 most frequent failures of satisfaction surveys • Determine who your customers really are in every context • Ask the three “word formulas” that always uncover priorities • Translate squishy perceptions into objective measures and innovative alternatives • Connect customer satisfaction, product design, and growth

TOOLS YOU’LL TAKE AWAY INCLUDE: • An easy-to-understand, step-by-step method for defining what your customers want • An excellence framework that balances customer and enterprise values

Tools such as surveys, quality function deployment (QFD), the Kano model, ISO 9000, Six Sigma, and others have been increasingly used to capture the voice of the customer (VoC). While they have all made contributions, none answer key questions every practitioner must answer. This session will provide those answers.

• A jargon-free language that eliminates ambiguity

The firm that lost a $400 billion contract—referenced in this presentation—is simply one more scenario of what can go wrong when interpreting customer priorities. On the other hand, examples from government, healthcare, and such recognizable firms as Starbucks, Amazon.com, Southwest Airlines, Honda, Motorola, and Google illustrate the growth potential possible by using the easy-to-understand but rigorous methodology described in this session. 

AGENDA:

• Tools to (a) differentiate three roles a customer can play in any context, (b) discover whether the customers with most power have it appropriately, and (c) identify the priorities that are and are not measured

• The seven practices most often used to understand customers • 10 reasons why surveys fail, and how to get success • Defining performance, perception, and outcome expectations • How to define and balance competing interests • Demographics we easily miss • Application tools: The number-one characteristic driving the best customer-friendly enterprises, and a policy of satisfaction

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Day Two Uncovering Customer Expectations • The “word formulas” that always uncover what customers want • How to separate the 12 critically different customer voices • Application tool: Voice of the Customer

Benchmarks, Standards, and Expectations • Assessing the alignment of customer priorities with current performance measures • How to avoid confusing minimums with optimums • Producer-centered vs. customer-centered measures

“As a directorate, we struggled with (1) what a ‘client-centered culture’ really meant in terms of our organization, and (2) what do we need to do to get there. Your session met those two objectives for our diverse scientific leadership group.” Ted Sawchuk, Manager, Quality Management System/ISO, Meteorological Service of Canada

Measuring Satisfaction With and Without Surveys • Taking the mystery out of what to measure while avoiding overkill

Connecting the Customer’s Voice to Innovation and Product Design

• How to translate squishy perceptions into objective criteria

• Convergent vs. divergent thinking: improvement and innovation

• Characteristics of a good survey • Application tool: creating measures

• Why no one really wants a better mousetrap • Five characteristics of “stuff that sucks” • Application tool: product design table

Steps to Success • Examples of application in industry and government • Selecting the right targets for application • How to get maximum impact • The action plan

“Mr. Lawton’s work clearly places him in a position to be today’s premier thinker and practitioner of quality as defined by customer satisfaction. It causes revolutionary new managerial thinking and decision making.” Bruce E. Laviolette, Ph.D., Director, Management Systems, Naval Air Systems Command

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Registration Instructions Full 2-Day Program* (Team Price) Team Size

Nonmember

Member

Team of 3

$2,184

$1,850

Team of 4 – 5

$2,982

$2,330

Team of 6 – 10

$5,824

$4,659

For more information, please visit asq.org/excellence. *Participants will collaborate in teams for application. To optimize relevance, value, and ease of implementing your insights, we strongly recommend attending with peers or colleagues. You’ll have the opportunity to work on your own issues during the workshop. If you do not have any colleagues to work with, please contact us.

   

Instructor Robin Lawton Robin Lawton, president of International Management Technologies, Inc. (IMT) since 1985, is a best-selling author and internationally recognized expert in creating rapid strategic alignment between enterprise objectives and customer priorities. He has over 30 years of experience directing both strategic and operational improvement initiatives in industry, healthcare, government, education, and international enterprises. His powerful but easy-tounderstand principles and tools are outlined in his book Creating a Customer-Centered Culture: Leadership in Quality, Innovation, and Speed (Quality Press), as well as in numerous publications at www.imtC3.com. He was ranked #1 of 88 speakers by an international organization in 2007 and is regularly ranked “best speaker” at major conferences organized by the Federal Executive Board, Japan Management Association, American Management Association, American Quality Institute, International ISO Conference, Minnesota Healthcare Association, ASQ, Chamber of Commerce, Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME), and many others.  Lawton has been recognized for making profound contributions to leadership practices, equivalent to those of Dr. Edwards Deming, who became well known for his management principles and process improvement methods. Lawton’s work has similar importance for the service and knowledge-intensive enterprise of the 21st century, with special focus on new ways for understanding the voice of the customer and translating them into outstanding, cost-effective, and innovative products and services.  Top awards have been won by many organizations as a direct result of applying IMT’s customer-centered culture (C3) principles. They include the Missouri Department of Revenue (Missouri Baldrige), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (California Baldrige), the U.S. Coast Guard (Maryland Baldrige), and Louisville/Jefferson County (ASQ International Team Competition). Other clients include government agencies from Alaska to Vermont, AT&T, U.S. Department of Defense, Homeland Security, American Honda, Motorola, Siemens, Blue Cross Blue Shield, American Express, Ford, Eastman Kodak, Mayo Clinic, Group Health Cooperative, and many other international clients from various industries. Leadership in Excellence and Customer Focus

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