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Quality management. Process mapping. Speed to production. In the past 50 years, a rigorous, measurement-based methodology called Six Sigma has brought production management to previously unimaginable levels of success and sophistication. Top corporations such as Motorola and GE have built their reputations, products, and revenues using this approach. Indeed, Six Sigma has found widespread application in every significant industry and business—except marketing and sales. In Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way, sales and quality guru Michael Webb shows how to blend marketing and sales efforts with the cutting-edge methods of Six Sigma to boost their bottom lines. With Webb’s book as a guide, readers learn to engineer rapid routes to customer value, accurately predict future revenue, and ensure return on investment for their projects. In Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way, you will: * Find out why "the usual fixes" for sales problems don't work * Meet executives who have used Six Sigma to imrpove marketing and sales results * See the pitfalls that await the unwary when applying process improvement in sales * Learn how to introduce Six Sigma to sales and marketing professionals * Discover through examples and cases how to manage sales as a process Webb walks readers through several Six Sigma sales and marketing projects from start to finish, highlighting the tools, decisions, and results that made them successful. He shows the practical methods managers use to translate process improvement principles to the human world of selling and marketing. With his dual background in sales and marketing management and in quality improvement, Webb speaks clearly to readers in both disciplines. This makes Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way,the indispensible guide for sales and marketing professionals who want to excel in today's business environment, and for quality improvement experts who want to help them.

"Toyota Kata gets to the essence of how Toyota manages continuous improvement and human ingenuity, through its improvement kata and coaching kata. Mike Rother explains why typical companies fail to understand the core of lean and make limited progress―and what it takes to make it a real part of your culture."
―Jeffrey K. Liker, bestselling author of The Toyota Way

"[Toyota Kata is] one of the stepping stones that will usher in a new era of management thinking."
―The Systems Thinker

"How any organization in any industry can progress from old-fashioned management by results to a strikingly different and better way."
―James P. Womack, Chairman and Founder, Lean Enterprise Institute

"Practicing the improvement kata is perhaps the best way we've found so far for actualizing PDCA in an organization."
―John Shook, Chairman and CEO, Lean Enterprise Institute

The Definitive Work on Six Sigma―Revised and Fully Updated

Lean organisations seem to work in a simple manner and operate with an innate calmness. They have removed much of the complexity that inhibits the performance of other companies, but achieving this level of simplicity is not easy. In The Simplicity of Lean, Philip Holt provides a comprehensive handbook of the Lean principles, presented in an accessible and easy to apply manner.

The Simplicity of Lean is a step-by-step guide to the Lean Thinking that makes your organisation more efficient and effective. The book offers the necessary context of how to apply Lean Thinking to make your Lean Transformation successful. Alongside the theory and the practical application of Lean, Philip also shares his personal insights and experiences, as well as individual success stories (and failures) from various Lean leaders from across the world.

The Simplicity of Lean is the perfect guide to make your Lean journey a resounding success.

Philip Holt is Senior Vice President, Global Transformation, at GKN Aerospace and a Board Member of the Operational Excellence Society. He studied Engineering at Manchester Metropolitan University and Management at the Wharton School of Pennsylvania and the University of Warwick, was an engineer at Gillette and led the Lean Deployment worldwide at Philips for over twelve years. He achieved Lean Master status and has summarised his 30+ years of experience and insights into Lean Leadership in his previous book Leading with Lean and his most recent book, The Simplicity of Lean.

Philip Holt is Head of Operational Excellence, Accounting Operations at Philips, and tells us exactly what Lean Leadership is, how we can learn to apply it and how you can convince the workplace never to settle for anything less than excellence.

We also learn how to redefine our leadership style and how to identify and eliminate wasteful activities within the company. This way you can recognize, realize and retain the ideal situation. In Leading with Lean, Philip Holt shows us the best ways to arrange a high-performance organization and gives us simple tools and insights for each leader to aspire to greatness, for themselves and for their teams.

While Lean practices have been successfully implemented into the process industry with excellent results for over 20 years (including the author’s own award winning example at Exxon Chemical), that industry has been especially slow in adopting Lean. Part of the problem is that the process industry needs its own version of Lean. The larger part of the problem is resistance to transformational change, a barrier that can only be overcome with effective leadership and results-oriented planning that engages rather than excludes all stakeholders.