Karen Martin – författare

The first of its kind—a Value Stream Mapping book written for those in service and office environments who need to streamline operations

Value Stream Mapping is a practical, how-to guide that helps decision-makers improve value stream efficiency in virtually any setting, including construction, energy, financial service, government, healthcare, R&D, retail, and technology. It gives you the tools to address a wider range of important VSM issues than any other such book, including the psychology of change, leadership, creating teams, building consensus, and charter development.

Karen Martin is principal consultant for Karen Martin & Associates, LLC, instructor for the University of California, San Diego''s Lean Enterprise program, and industry advisor to the University of San Diego''s Industrial and Systems Engineering program.Mike Osterling provides support and leadership to manufacturing and non-manufacturing organizations on their Lean Transformation Journey. In a continuous improvement leadership role for six years, Mike played a key role in Square D Company''s lean transformation in the 1990s.

Award-winning business performance improvement and Lean management expert Karen Martin diagnoses a ubiquitous business management and leadership problem―the lack of clarity―and outlines specific actions to dramatically improve organizational performance. 

Through her global consulting projects, keynote speeches, and work with thousands of leaders, Karen has seen first-hand how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and erodes employee engagement. Ambiguity is the corporate default state, a condition so prevalent that “tolerance for ambiguity” has become a clichéd job requirement.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

In Clarity First, Karen provides methods and insights for achieving clarity to unleash potential, innovate at higher levels, and solve the problems that matter to deliver outstanding business results. Both a visionary road map and practical guide, this book will help leaders:

* Identify and communicate the organization’s true purpose

* Set achievable priorities* Deliver greater customer value through more efficient processes* Build organization-wide problem solving capabilities* Develop personal clarity to become a more direct, purposeful, and successful leader Eliminating ambiguity is the first step for leaders and organizations to achieve strategic goals. Learn how to gain the clarity needed to make better decisions, lead more effectively, and boost organizational performance.

When it comes to leading an outstanding organization, every great leader needs Clarity First.

Winner of The Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award!

After two decades in the trenches of helping companies design and build better, more efficient operations, Karen Martin has pinpointed why performance improvement programs usually fail: Chaos, the sneaky but powerful force that frustrates customers, keeps business leaders awake at night, and saps company morale.

In The Outstanding Organization, Karen offers a toolbox for combating chaos by creating the organizational conditions that will allow your improvement efforts to return greater gains.

Proven, practical, and surprisingly simple, Karen’s system focuses on four key behaviors for organizational excellence—Clarity, Focus, Discipline, Engagement—that, once instilled into a company’s DNA, open the door to sustainable growth and profit. This well-organized, inviting-to-read guide reveals everything you need to know about:

This no-nonsense book helps you get to the crux of the problem, so you can inject the sensible, disciplined calm that enables the levels of performance and innovation mandated by today’s business environment—and help your organization become truly outstanding.

This collection draws together twenty-five stories selected from two ground breaking anthologies published by MaThoko Books, an imprint of Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA) in South Africa. The first volume, Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction won the 26th Lambda Literary Award. In 2017 Queer Africa 2: New fiction added fresh material to the LGBTIQA+ literary landscape. Stories from Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, Botswana, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe celebrate the diversity and fluidity of queer and African identifications and expressions.