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For many startups pivoting means moving away from what they are doing that isn’t working, but for larger organizations, the pivot is often about expanding and leveraging. Your pivot points come from your business model canvas, which gives you your base menu you can build your strategic plan off of.

Blind spots occur in business when we naturally move toward the areas of business we are most comfortable and interested in and neglect the areas that don’t hold our focus. The business model canvas helps bring into focus neglected areas so that we can take action and improve the business.

Your business model helps identify who needs to be brought into the conversation when you are making a change in the company. The phrase, “I don’t know” means that you are missing key people in your conversation.

The business model canvas is not solely for the benefit of entrepreneurs, all businesses can benefit from it especially when evaluating changes in their business model. The business model canvas is a tool that businesses can use to facilitate a dialog around where your business model currently is, where it needs

In Part 1 of this series (Going Beyond Lean Thinking to Define Value). I challenged how the lean tenet regarding delivering value to our customer has been practiced.  In Part 2 I wrote for Industry Week, I examine how clearly understanding what the customers value and why they value it

Last year I was invited to be a guest on the Iowa Lean Consortium Radio Network Podcast with host Steve Wilson. The Iowa Lean Consortium is a dynamic, member-driven, non-profit dedicated to advancing lean in all sectors of the economy . Driven by members needs, the ILC provides the philosophy, tools,

In my most the recent column I wrote for IndustryWeek I explore the importance of your own personal lean journey. Your organization may not be started on its lean journey but that doesn’t mean you can’t be. When signing copies of my book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean, I would

The Wall Street Journey released their inaugural Management Top 250, a list of the best managed companies. It is based on the research of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, releasing a much larger list and their scoring in this table Amazon tops the list, followed by Apple and

We often hear “we cannot manage what we cannot measure”.  I think the better way to say it and approach improvement is that you cannot manage or improve what you cannot evaluate. As you are looking to improve something you need to ask how you are going to understand what

When people talk about a lean journey, they say the word “journey” as if they understand it will take time to change a culture, however their behavior often reveals they don’t have the relentless patience will actually take to create change.  We talked about the effort required to changing a