Barry L. Cross - Böcker

The parameters of competition in business today are changing -- big does not necessarily beat small anymore; fast is beating slow. Agility, speed, and flexibility are the key elements of a successful strategy and execution in the corporate world as wells as in government agencies, health care, and education..How well will your firm execute its strategy? What barriers exist that inhibit your execution? Are you keeping one eye on tomorrow’s customers, while you manage those of today? These are all key questions as we strive to deliver value on an ongoing basis.Simple: Killing Complexity for a Lean and Agile Organization is about agility and simplicity, in which achieving simplicity comes from a focus on the customer. Agility begins with planning, and leadership teams must develop decent vision. Generally, leaders know what they want to do, but many organizations break down, however, I when trying to implement the action plan. With over 25 years of industry, teaching, and consulting experience, the author illustrates how organizations can: Recognize who their true customers are, and appreciate what those customers want Begin to eliminate the products, services, processes and ‘work’ that gets in the way of delivering value to those customers Focus people and processes towards value creation, even in what are perceived as non-customer centric operations Avoid brand confusion and the ‘all things to all people’ mentality The complexities of managing in today’s world both obscures decision making and layers on challenges that bog an organization down, preventing leadership from understanding what their customers want. By understanding who those customers are, and what they want, leaders can focus innovation strategy and projects in ways that deliver sustainable value. Even in not-for-profit and government agencies, executing in an aligned organization can become the profitable standard business process.

Do these comments sound familiar? We would love to be more innovative, but we don’t have the resourcesInnovation works in some companies; we just aren’t that creativeWe get some good ideas, but nothing ever happens with themUnfortunately, they reflect the general perception and environment for innovation in many firms today. In Lean Innovation: Understanding What's Next in Today's Economy, Barry Cross explores how to use Lean to free up resources from within the organization to support and ‘fund’ innovation and inspire a culture of creativity. Easy to read and humorous, Cross’ stories resonate and his tactics are very applicable. He demonstrates that you likely have the people needed to drive innovation.Based on Cross’s twenty-five years of experience, and filled with stories and anecdotes from a number of industries, the book presents a different look at innovation and how to recognize opportunities for moving past merely talking about innovation to action and making it a priority. The author examines roadblocks and how to use enablers like Lean to facilitate and focus the approach on driving the focus forward, to the place where creativity in our ranks is more important that responding to an email and where the organization isn’t afraid to make an existing product redundant in favor of a new opportunity.