Engaging Front Line Staff with Kaizen

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Engaging Front-Line Staff with Kaizen Guests were Joe Swartz and Mark Graban

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Healthcare Kaizen focuses on the principles methods of daily continuous improvement, or “Kaizen,� for healthcare professionals and organizations. In 1989, Dr. Donald M. Berwick, founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, endorsed the principles of Kaizen in the New England Journal of Medicine, describing it as "the continuous search for opportunities for all processes to get better." This book shows how to make this goal a reality.

About the Authors: Mark Graban is an author, consultant, and speaker in the field of lean healthcare. He is the author of Lean Hospitals. Mark has worked as a consultant and coach to healthcare organizations throughout North America and Europe. He was formerly a senior fellow with the Lean Enterprise Institute and continues to serve as a faculty member.

Joseph E. Swartz is the Director of Business Transformation for Franciscan St. Francis Health of Indianapolis, IN. He has been leading continuous improvement efforts for 18 years, including 7 years in healthcare, and has led more than 200 Lean and Six Sigma improvement projects.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Transcription of Podcast Joe Dager: Welcome everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of the Business901 podcast.

With me today is Joseph Swartz. He has been leading continuous improvement efforts for 10 years, including seven years in healthcare, and has led more than 200 Lean Six Sigma improvement projects. He is currently the director of business transformation for Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Along with him is Mark Graban, who is the author of "Lean Hospitals" and has worked as a consultant and coach to healthcare organizations throughout the world.

Mark serves as a faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute and is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus; a startup software company that helps healthcare organizations manages continuous improvement efforts.

Mark writes the immensely popular "Lean Blog," which not only focuses on healthcare but touches upon all things Lean.

I would like to welcome the both of you and could I just start with how the two of you became connected for your new book, "Healthcare Kaizen"?

Mark Graban: Sure. Thanks, Joe. I'll address that and then Joe can tell, I guess, his side of the story. It turns out we have a shared connection with Norman Bodak, who people might know for all the trips that Norman has made to Japan, and all the books that he's written about Kaizen and continuous improvement. Back in 2005, when I barely knew Norman, I was getting into healthcare, and somehow we got connected. Norman said, Engaging Front-Line Staff with Kaizen Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems "Hey, I know this guy Joe Swartz, who is also moving from manufacturing to healthcare. I think you two should talk."

I know Joe, and I traded emails. I don't know if we talked on the phone. We might have.

Then, a couple of years later, we crossed paths at one of the Society for Health Systems' annual conferences.

Joe was presenting on Kaizen, and you could see all the great stuff they were doing at Franciscan St. Francis Health. We got talking and kind of started brainstorming and the long, short story; we decided it would be a very good collaboration to do the book together.

Joe: What was the good part of having a co-author? Because you've authored, a book on your own before, Mark, but what was a good part?

Mark: Joe has written and co-authored books before, and he can tell you about that. It turned out to be a good collaboration because, for better or for worse, my experience has been flitting around as a consultant with lots of different organizations and introducing people to Lean and Kaizen in lots of different places. Joe brings such a depth of experience that's so impressive, of these five-plus years of really driving this change deeply in one organization. Those different examples and experiences, I think, came together really well into a great story in the book. Joe can tell you more.

Joe: Joe, what other books did you work on?

Joseph Swartz: I wrote a book with my father called "Seeing David in the Stone." It's about how to find and seize great opportunities. Then, I was a contributing author to Engaging Front-Line Staff with Kaizen Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems another book on leadership. A book's such a huge project, that it's a challenge to pull off individually. I've partnered with all the last ones, and I found it very advantageous.

I think partnering with Mark was a coup on my part.

I feel grateful and fortunate to have partnered with Mark; because he brought a whole dimension to this that I couldn't have anticipated. I had bits and pieces but he was instrumental in bringing linking it all together. He really thought through the structure of it very well, and that was hugely advantageous.

Then, he's a master marketer and a master in so many other dimensions, so I'm so appreciative to be a part of that.

Joe: I think it's so interesting how you complement each other, having that experience of five years at Franciscan St. Francis Health, where you're really able to see things that people can't see from the outside a lot of times. That is really remarkable to add to Mark's expertise for the collaborative effort. Joe, did you start with Franciscan St. Francis Health when they first started to move towards Lean?

Joseph: Yes, I did. I was brought in with the initial team. I was one of the team members. I went in as a contractor, and they ended up hiring me. As far as the Kaizen, Mark and I were on a similar journey in continuous improvement. We were discovering similar stuff in healthcare -- a good idea to get back to the basics and teach those basics, and teach people how to make simple improvements and get their confidence with these improvements, so they can make bigger and bigger and bigger improvements as time goes along. It's really about developing people.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems He was on the same track, and we would dialogue back and forth about that.

Joe: I think it's really tough for a hospital, more specifically, to be able to institute continuous improvement or institute Lean, from my vantage point. There are so many shifts, so many different staffing things, numerous shifts and types of personnel. Can you mention how you go about, maybe, immersing people in programs like this?

Mark: Well, from what I've seen, that's a challenge, the fact that you've got lots of part-time people, you have people working multiple shifts and part-time and weekends.

There's a big communication challenge, in terms of training and educating people about what Kaizen is all about. Then, there're just the challenges of the communication across different shifts as people identify opportunities, as they're proposing countermeasures to implement, as they're testing and trying to help spread those changes. Communication is critical. I've seen a lot of things work. Simple bulletin boards can help communicate across shifts.

You have an idea; you have a structure. Rather than doing the suggestion box model -- I think suggestion boxes are a model of the past -- having ideas out on a bulletin board allows people to walk by and see what's going on, contribute notes and talk about it.

Then, you have people using software. I've been involved in a startup company called KaiNexus that was started by an emergency-room doctor who worked night shifts. That was part of his problem statement, "How do we communicate? There really aren't managers around on the night shift. How do we make change happen?"

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Whether it's cards and bulletin boards or software, there're creative things that people are doing to break down some of those communication barriers.

Joe: Does the book introduce Kaizen at a pretty basic level for everybody to understand?

Mark: It really does. We say it's change, but the word "Kaizen," if you break it down into its two Japanese root words, "kai" means change and "zen" means good. It's not just change. It's making sure it's change for the better, and that it's really an improvement.

That's one of the core fundamental things that we wrote about. Not all changes are good.

We need to make sure that we're following a good, systematic but not overly complicated Plan-Do-Study-Adjust cycle. It comes back to the Deming cycle of not just doing things, but doing things as a test with a hypothesis and making sure, "Did we really get the results that we expected?"

A lot of times, that's where people get frustrated, when changes get forced on them and there's never any reevaluation. We're not really doing the full PDSA cycle. That's one of the fundamentals that we've tried to address in the book.

Joe: I've always heard that most people will say of the PDSA cycle, people do the "Plan" really well. Maybe even the "Do" part well. It's the "Study" and the "Adjust" that they fail at?

Mark: Sometimes I wonder if we even do the "Plan" well, if you include the "Plan" as understanding the current condition and understanding root causes. A lot of times, it's just a "Do" cycle or a Do-Do cycle.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: One of the things you mentioned in the book, "It's often said that people hate to change." You go on to say that the book disproves this notion. Can you let me know the secret or let the listeners know the secret, without buying the book?

Mark: There's a great expression -- it's often attributed either to Peter Drucker or Peter Sholtes -- the expression is something like, "People don't hate change. They hate being changed." There's a world of difference between having change forced on you versus getting to participate in that process. Generally, people like their own ideas. Kaizen is really about that process of engaging people to come up with ideas in a grassroots, bottom-up way, if you will. One example I often use is let's say that you and a bunch of coworkers are going to go out to lunch. It's Wednesday and it's time for your group to go, and somebody says, "I've decided we're all going to go and try a new restaurant. It's this kind of fusion of Pan-British-Asian-Thai-Mongolian cuisine. It sounds great."

Well, everybody else in the group might pause and think, "I don't even know what that is!

I don't know if that sounds good or not." People might resist that new restaurant, or they might cancel and not want to go, but if we had a process where everybody had input -- Kaizen's not just about voting on what do we do or what don't we do -- but if you got to choose the restaurant, I think generally people like going to new places when it's either their decision or at least they have some input on it, as opposed to being forced or dragged into it. I think that makes a world of difference.

I don't know if my example's a silly one, but I think things like that happen in the workplace sometimes. "I came up with a new idea. Everyone else should love it." Well, it's almost; I think, human nature for people to question and challenge other people's ideas, Engaging Front-Line Staff with Kaizen Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems and that's a good thing. We just need to make sure we have mechanisms where people can actually have that discussion, rather than being forced to adopt a new idea or a new standard.

Joseph: We devoted a whole chapter (chapter 8) to discussing ideas when it's not just you and your idea that you're going to do and only you have to change when you involve other people who also have to change, and we address that. In chapter 8, we call it the Art of Kaizen.

Joe: What are some of the oddities in developing Kaizen in healthcare?

Mark: You know, maybe it's an oddity in a very good way. People in healthcare have such a passion for patients, and for the work that they do. The intrinsic motivation that's there in healthcare is very high, and it's something we can really tap into compared with other industries. When we look at getting people started early on, and Joe has a lot great examples about this too; you're getting people engaged in Kaizen and helping them come up with little things that either make their day go a little more smoothly.

You identify some little improvement, something that bothers you or gets in the way of doing what you need to do for patients, and let's address that little thing.

Or let's come up with little things that make the patients' experience better, let's improve patient safety, quality, and outcomes. It's not that hard to get people excited about that.

That's where I think Kaizen is different than a lot of top-down improvement or change initiatives that are driven in the name of cost-cutting. T idea of cost-cutting, I don't know if Engaging Front-Line Staff with Kaizen Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems it inspires people in other industries, but I think particularly in healthcare, the idea that, "Oh well we're going to go and save a lot of money," that doesn't get people real excited.

And the great thing about Kaizen is that when you focus on all these little things (and it's often hard to quantify) quality, staff and patient satisfaction; you do all these things. You reduce waiting time; that cost and financial improvement tends to happen as an end result cumulated impact of all these different changes.

So I think we can tap into that motivation, and I think compared to my days in manufacturing that's a huge advantage in healthcare, that we have that level of intrinsic motivation.

Joe: There's been a lot of Six Sigma or as some people call it, Lean Six Sigma driven into healthcare and they go through training cycles and develop green belts in healthcare.

What's the difference between Lean and Kaizen being at a healthcare facility versus that Six Sigma mentality?

Joseph: We started lean Six Sigma here at St. Francis Health in 2006. We introduced Kaizen in 2007, a year later, and I think after a year of implementing Lean Six Sigma we realized if we're going to reach all 4,000 employees it's not going to be through Lean Six Sigma. The problem was with Lean Six Sigma you develop these project teams that have 12 to 18 people on them - sometimes more sometimes less. They take numerous months to execute and complete. So even if you have a few black belts you're only going to impact 50-100 people in a year, you're going to infect 50-100 people with continuous improvement and how to do it.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems We needed to infect 4,000 employees on how to make continuous improvement happen. It would take us 20-some years to pull that off. We knew we needed something beyond Lean Six Sigma.

I've seen some similar kind of stuff done in manufacturing with Kaizen, where we could engage everyone in the organization - teach them the basic simple tools of Lean and let them make individual improvements and work in small teams, and it was powerful and I knew we needed that for healthcare.

I think Mark was on the same journey. He saw that's something we need in healthcare, and in order to engage all the employees because we're under such pressure to change so rapidly in healthcare on so many different fronts.

Mark: Even this idea as Joe puts it about getting everyone involved in improvement; Six Sigma doesn't always bring that to an organization. But we see in a lot of organizations where Lean hasn't brought improvement to everybody either. We share some of those examples in the book. For example, ThedaCare is really well known for the first four years of their Lean work. It was all week-long rapid-improvement events all the time. That was their only model for improvement, and their only mode of change.

Week-long events are great - not every problem, not every opportunity requires a formal team and three days or five days, so like Joe was saying ThedaCare learned they weren't able to teach people or touch people fast enough by only doing these week-long events.

So they started layering what they called continuous daily improvement or daily Kaizen on top of those events and there are other examples in the book of people who have started Engaging Front-Line Staff with Kaizen Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems with daily Kaizen and then started doing week-long events once started people learned the Kaizen model and PDSA model. I think, even if you look at Toyota as an example, they'll teach that you shouldn't choose one type of improvement or another. It's really all Kaizen.

It's all PDSA. It's either relatively small things that you can address in a relatively short timeframe, or it's something that requires a weeklong event, or there's bigger systemic change that can't even be done in just one week. These different modes of improvement, even Six Sigma, it's all pretty compatible. They can coexist.

Joe: You're really allowing Lean to grow organically, but how do you share? We talked about the different culture that's at a hospital. How do you spread that?

Mark: People in healthcare really prize and value this idea of autonomy. "I get to do things my way," especially, doctors and surgeons and, sometimes, with nurses and other healthcare professionals. I think that just goes to show why the old, top-down change model doesn't work in that environment. In fact, there was somebody who commented on my blog this week, a doctor from a hospital who said, "There's some sort of new protocol that was just forced out on everybody from on high, and not everybody agreed that this is the thing we should be doing with patients."

The one thing he highlighted, he didn't understand the problem. What problem is this addressing? It was a very low level of staff engagement, and it certainly wasn't Kaizen; it wasn't anything Lean. Some senior medical leader or administrative leader will say, "OK. Well, we learned here's some best practice from some other organization. Everyone needs to do it."

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Well, usually that doesn't really translate to a lot of change. People nod their heads.

"Uh-huh, uh-huh." Then, they don't do it.

This Kaizen model sometimes is very time-consuming. You're building consensus. You're trying to get people on the same page. It doesn't mean that people magically agree, but when you go through the steps of making sure you've identified and communicated a problem, and you've talked about the root cause and you've talked about, "Here's this countermeasure and here's why we think it's going to work."

When you have that type of communication, as Joe mentioned, and as we talk about in chapter eight of the book, you can do a lot to engage people and bring people on board, when you involve them in this type of improvement. A little of involvement goes a long way. A lot of times, people just get bent out of shape, "You never involve me. You never communicated."

It's understandable, why they balk or not want to be involved. I think that's where the things that we have in the book and in this Kaizen model, the softer side of Kaizen, if you will, I think there's a lot to contribute to try to help people engage physicians and staff members in a better way.

Joe: Can someone touch upon what the Kaizen Wall of Fame is there?

Mark: One of the key steps in the Kaizen model is to document and share what you've done. Not just to do a bunch of change, but part of the study cycle is to do a little write-up, a before-and-after with pictures, diagrams, and just show simply, "Here's what we've done." You can post that on a bulletin board in a department. You can post it out by the Engaging Front-Line Staff with Kaizen Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems cafeteria, if it's an idea that you want people across the hospital to see and learn from and go choose to adopt.

Or, you have organizations that use software. That's one thing that KaiNexus does. Joe's organization has some software that they've built to do a similar thing. Joe, do you want to...you can share a little about how share these Kaizen success stories, maybe.

Joseph: We have a bulletin board in our cafeteria that we post monthly, some of the really rare Kaizens. We also send them out through our COO periodically through email. In individual departments, department leaders have a bulletin board where they post notable Kaizens that their staff has done. Mark's right. The real power of Kaizen is in the doing, but it's also in the sharing. Someone else sees an idea that someone else has done. They're free to adopt it and implement it in their processes in their unique way, and then it's their Kaizen. They can use our database to record what they did, in the database, and it's accessible by all 4,000 employees once it's in the database.

Joe: Is it just accepted that this works or...how is it controlled? Does someone have veto power over some of these ideas? How do you control a Kaizen or a cycle like that, to maintain control?

Mark: Well, I guess part of what we're trying to challenge is the idea of control that managers and leaders need to be less controlling of their employees and the change process. That doesn't mean that leaders are completely hands-off or laissez faire about things. As Joe mentioned earlier, the second step of the Kaizen model is to discuss problems and discuss potential changes. The role of a manager shifts from being the old suggestion box model of some far off committee or manager just voting "Yea" or "Nay" on Engaging Front-Line Staff with Kaizen Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems suggestions instead of thinking of or approving or rejecting Kaizen ideas. It's really more about collaborating, coaching, and facilitating.

I know that sounds really swishy, soft, and fuzzy but this idea if somebody has a "bad idea" that's impractical or too expensive, or is going to have an impact on a different department.

Sometimes the manager's job is to raise that as an issue but not then just saying, no, we can't do that. The manager can help coach and guide to find something else that we can do that addresses that issue in a better way or addresses that issue without side effects.

Sometimes people come up with ideas that are well intended but sub optimizing.

One example that comes to mind, inpatient unit, there might be delays in seeing new patients once they've been brought up to the unit. Once I saw a Kaizen idea where one of the nurses said, "Let's delay admissions from the emergency department until we're done with shift change."

As a manager you may say that's one way of addressing it. But think of the implications now, we're just forcing our problem back on a different department. Making the patient wait in the emergency department is not good for that patient. It's not good for other patients in the way that it might back up the ED. If the problem is we can't see patients promptly because we're dealing with shift change, we need to come up with local process improvements that would change the way we're doing handoff to shift communications so that we can see the patient without just forcing them back, keeping them in the ED longer.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Sometimes a manager has to play that role of challenging ideas but doing so not in a way that turns people off. Because sometimes people say, hey, I had an idea, and you said no so forget Kaizen.

I'm not participating anymore. I mean, there's a real fine line and gray area between challenging people and doing so in a constructive way that doesn't turn them off.

Joseph: That was one of the concerns when we first rolled out Kaizen. Some of our leaders had that very concern, uncontrolled change. Really, there are checks and balances in the system like Mark says. We first ask Kaizeneers that practice this to go discuss the idea with anybody that the change will affect. Peer pressure is pretty powerful. They can't just go out and do anything they want. They'd have to check with their teammates and stuff.

Then, like Mark said the supervisor or the manager coach. Really there's very few that get implemented that is really wild, uncontrolled change.

Mark: This isn't just lots of people running around doing random, unconnected things.

There are these checks and balances. If we're doing a test of change, if we've tried something that maybe it wasn't as well thought out as maybe it should be then we can learn from that.

So managers can make sure that people aren't doing things that would likely hurt a patient or hurt a coworker. Sometimes I say, well, I'm not sure if that's going to work, but it doesn't seem like it will really cause any harm. Let's try it. Let's follow the PDSA model and see what the results are because you might be pleasantly surprised, or it may confirm your Engaging Front-Line Staff with Kaizen Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems suspicion of well; I thought that wasn't going to work. We tested and learned and confirmed that it didn't work.

That's something that helps you do Kaizen better in the future.

Joe: I think those were great points because I can just remember in my experience biting my tongue a couple times. Gee, I'm glad I didn't say anything because it worked.

What can Lean learn from healthcare?

Mark: Lean is incredibly customer focused. The patient's focus in healthcare is a powerful thing. I think this idea of extending that back to manufacturing or other settings but not being fixated on just our internal processes but really thinking about do we understand what the customers need. One thing I've seen that works great in healthcare, if you're doing a rapid improvement event is to actually have a real patient come and participate in that process because a lot of times it's tempting in healthcare.

If somebody on the team has been a patient at the hospital where they work, or they've had a child who's been a patient they'll say, I'll play the role of the patient.

But an insider who's also been a patient often knows way too much about the organization.

They don't have the wide-eyed newness of an outsider. So having a real patient participate in a team can be really helpful.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems They'll tell you what they value and what irritates them. I think maybe there's an opportunity, hopefully some people in manufacturing are doing this that they actually have customers come and participate in Kaizen improvement in a very direct way.

Joe: Can you tell me a little about the target audience of your book, who should buy it and a quick summary of it?

Mark: Well, the book is published by Productivity Press. The target audience -- we address this in the introduction. There's a lot of material in the book that we think is helpful for people at different levels, in different ways. We think senior leaders are going to read the book in a certain way and jump through certain chapters. Front-line staff and front-line managers, I think, are going to read it in a different way and take out all of the examples.

There are 120 plus examples from different organizations of real Kaizen improvements. I think the internal Lean coaches, Lean facilitators, are one of the other core audiences. How do they help set up and establish a Kaizen program for the whole organization?

We hope there's a little something for everybody. If they don't read the whole book, there're at least chapters and things that they can gain from the whole thing.

Joe: Joe, could you tell me a little about the examples throughout the book?

Joseph: Sure. They're real. They're from our staff. We combed through them and looked for the best, and those are the ones that we post. We just took a bunch of the ones that got posted over the years. Some of them, we've worked with the staff to kind of refine, but the nice thing about it is that we've got a whole cross-section from all kinds of different Engaging Front-Line Staff with Kaizen Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems areas within the hospital and all kinds of different Lean scenes, Lean disciplines. It really hits across a wide area.

Joe: The book has; I think it says, over 200 color photographs in it, which is just a huge number for any book that I've ever seen.

Mark: Well, we were fortunate that Productivity Press collaborated, in terms of doing fullcolor printing, because there are so many great pictures. We want it to teach by example, not that people would go and copy those specific ideas, but just to help illustrate examples of Kaizen and different types of improvements. There might be cases where somebody might say, "Oh, great. Look at that idea. We could adopt that tomorrow." But that's not really the point. We want people to be inspired by what they see in the book and go and make their own Kaizens.

In fact, on the book's website, hckaizen.com, there's a way where -- some people have actually started doing this -- people can submit their own Kaizen examples. We're posting those on the web, to have a kind of living extension of the book where people can help share -- like Joe mentioned -- not just within their own organization but within the broader healthcare community.

In the conclusion of the book, we pose it as an experiment to see, "Can we share outside of our own organizations?" It's going to be really interesting to see how that develops.

That's one little feature there, within the website, that's going to hopefully help collect even more great examples.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: If someone could only take one thing away from the book, what would you want them to take away?

Mark: My thing would be, "Everybody can help improve. Everybody, "We've mentioned Norm Bodak and I give credit to Masaaki Imai, who says in his earlier works, "Kaizen is for everybody, from the CEO to the janitor and all points in between." In the book, we have examples from housekeeping staff. We've got an example from Joe's COO. We almost got that whole spectrum. The one message, I would say, is that no matter what your education level, no matter what your job title, Kaizen is about improving your own work.

Everybody who does any job is an expert in that job, and they have a big role to play in improvement.

Joseph: I think we're all built with this innate ability or desire to be creative. I think what Kaizen does is it asks every employee to be creative. In that, I think it unleashes a lot of energy. Everybody wants to contribute. Everybody wants to participate, and they can do that in a creative way that advances the organization. I think it creates and develops people that do that on a daily basis.

Joe: How can someone purchase the book? You mentioned the website.

Mark: There are links, if people go to hckaizen.com, or they can find the book on Amazon. They can find it on BarnesandNoble.com. They can go to productivitypress.com.

We don't know for certain, but we're told that the book will be available in Kindle formats at or about the same time that the paperback is available, here at the end of June. This is a version of a Kindle book that is actually like the printed page, so it'll work great on iPads, Engaging Front-Line Staff with Kaizen Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Kindle Fire, on Macs and PCs. It won't be readable on the original e-Ink Kindle models, because there are so many pictures and examples, but the book will be available in that electronic format. It's almost a 400 page book, so it's easier to carry around in your iPad. Joe: I would like to thank the both of you, Mark and Joe, for the opportunity to interview you. This podcast will be available at the Business901 website and the Business901 iTunes store. Thanks to both of you.

Mark: Thanks for interviewing us, Joe. Joseph: Thank you, Joe.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joseph T. Dager Lean Marketing Systems Ph: 260-438-0411 Fax: 260-818-2022 Email: jtdager@business901.com Web/Blog: http://www.business901.com Twitter: @business901 What others say: In the past 20 years, Joe and I have collaborated on many difficult issues. Joe's ability to combine his expertise with "out of the box" thinking is unsurpassed. He has always delivered quickly, cost effectively and with ingenuity. A brilliant mind that is always a pleasure to work with." James R. Joe Dager is President of Business901, a progressive company providing direction in areas such as Lean Marketing, Product Marketing, Product Launches and Re-Launches. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Business901 provides and implements marketing, project and performance planning methodologies in small businesses. The simplicity of a single flexible model will create clarity for your staff and as a result better execution. My goal is to allow you spend your time on the need versus the plan.

An example of how we may work: Business901 could start with a consulting style utilizing an individual from your organization or a virtual assistance that is well versed in our principles. We have capabilities to plug virtually any marketing function into your process immediately. As proficiencies develop, Business901 moves into a coach’s role supporting the process as needed. The goal of implementing a system is that the processes will become a habit and not an event.

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