Mike Osterling

Karen Martin

Winner of The Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award! Align your leadership team to deliver the highest possible value to your customers Too many organizations today suffer from silo-centric behavior and intra-organizational conflict. Yet most don't understand what's holding them back from achieving outstanding performance. Value stream mapping--an essential but underused methodology--is a proven approach to help you visualize and resolve disconnects, redundancies, and gaps in your value delivery system. More than merely a tool to eliminate operational waste, value stream mapping is a highly effective means to transform leadership thinking, define strategy and priorities, and create customer-centric work flow. In this detailed guide, business performance improvement experts Karen Martin and Mike Osterling present a practical way to deeply understand how work gets done--in any environment--and how to design improved work systems. You'll learn how to: Prepare and engage your leadership team in the transformation process Gain a deep understanding about your current work systems and the related barriers to delivering value Design a future state that enables outstanding performance on all fronts Adopt the new design and lay the foundation for continued improvement Whether you are a novice, an experienced improvement practitioner, or a leader, Value Stream Mapping will help you design and operate your business more effectively. And if your organization already uses value stream mapping, this book will help you improve your transformation efforts. In today's rapid-fire business environment, there are too many problems to be solved and too many opportunities to be leveraged to operate without a highly effective means for accomplishing the important work to be done. Value stream mapping is the missing link in business management and, properly executed, has the power to address many business woes. PRAISE FOR VALUE STREAM MAPPING "Value stream mapping has evolved from its roots as a tool used by geeks to reimagine and reconfigure manufacturing operations to a process to enable deep organizational intervention and transformation. With Value Stream Mapping, Karen Martin and Mike Osterling provide an outstanding guide for practitioners engaged in the challenging work of improving the horizontal flow of value across organizations." -- John Shook, Chairman and CEO, Lean Enterprise Institute, and author, Learning to See "Despite decades of viewing value stream mapping as the core tool of Lean transformations, there is still confusion. Karen and Mike put mapping in its proper perspective as a methodology for getting high-performing teams to see waste, share a future state vision, and build meaningful actions that are carried out with passion and purpose." -- Jeffrey Liker, author, The Toyota Way "In Value Stream Mapping, Karen and Mike not only provide a great how-to book for transforming value streams, they also demonstrate the benefits that taking a holistic view can have on an organization's culture and commitment to customer value. There is something to learn for the novice and expert on every page." -- Jeff Chester, Chief Revenue Officer & Senior Vice President, Availity "Martin and Osterling have written an excellent book that shows you how to do value stream mapping and do it right. Follow their advice and your organization will get the profoundly radical change required to better serve your customers and create unprecedented profits and agility." -- Brian Maskell , author, Practical Lean Accounting "VSM is often misunderstood and underutilized. Strategically, it can be a Rosetta Stone to help bring disparate organizational silos together and a catalyst for stimulating and prioritizing enterprise-wide transformation. Karen and Mike have produced another terrific guide. Read it, practice it, share it, teach it." -- Steve Bell , author, Run Grow Transform “Value Stream Mapping is well worth picking up. It's a straightforward user's guide to constructing current-state and designing future-state value stream maps that help you visualize and improve your efforts to flow value to your customer.” -– Matthew May, author of The Laws of Subtraction

Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

Makhosazana Xaba

Queer Africa brings together historical and contemporary stories, affirming and disquieting stories, urban and rural stories. It features characters who are rooted firmly in their countries and cultures, and others who could live anywhere in the world. At its heart, the collection celebrates the diversity and fluidity of queer and African identifications and expressions, offering a sometimes radical reimagining of life on the continent. The stories courageously – and often in surprising and delightful ways – challenge assumptions about what it means to represent particular human experiences. As such, this collection of well-crafted and absorbing stories is for everyone: male and female, queer and straight, young and old, African and non-African. Quelle/Source: Verlag/Publisher.

New and Collected Fiction

Queer Africa

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 •Provide greater transparency about true versus assumed performance •Build strong problem-solving and critical thinking capabilities throughout the organization •Develop personal clarity to be 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.

Clarity First: How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance

Metrics-Based Process Mapping (MBPM) is a tactical-level, visual mapping approach that enables improvement teams to make effective, data-based decisions regarding waste elimination and measure ongoing process performance. The mapping technique, often used to drill down from a value stream map, integrates the functional orientation of traditional swim-lane process maps with time and quality metrics that are essential for designing improved processes. Building on the success of its popular predecessor, Metrics-Based Process Mapping: An Excel-Based Solution, this book takes readers to the next level in understanding processes and process improvement. Included with the book is an interactive macro-driven Excel tool, which allows users to electronically capture their current and future state maps. The tool also audits the maps for completeness, summarizes the metrics, and auto-calculates the improvements. Improvements to this version include: Foundational content about processes—what they are and how they vary A description of the difference between value-stream and process-level maps New content about how to bridge the gap between your current state and your desired future state Tips for effective team formation and mapping facilitation An implementation plan for those using the mapping methodology as a standalone tool and not part of a Kaizen Event The Excel-based tool included on the accompanying CD provides readers with a user-friendly way to electronically archive manually created maps in team settings for easier storage and distribution across your entire organization. While current and future state MBPMs are initially created during team-based activities using butcher paper and post-its, the electronic maps serve as standard work documentation for the improved process, enabling training, communication, and process monitoring activities. This flexible, user-friendly tool includes: A custom toolbar that simplifies map creation and editing Automated calculation of key metrics An audit feature to prevent mapping errors The ability to simulate how improvements will impact staffing requirements System Requirements: The tool is intended for use on PCs using Excel 2003 or later—it will NOT function with earlier versions of Excel, or on Macintosh computers. View a demo of the Excel tool at: www.mbpmapping.com

Identifying and Eliminating Waste in Office and Service Processes

Metrics-Based Process Mapping

This qualitative research study explored the perceptions associated with acute hospitalization of individuals defined as morbidly obese. Interviews were one-on-one and utilized a semi-structured design. Nine participants, six females and three males were interviewed. Questions were aimed at exploring individuals' personal hospital experience and their perceptions associated with care and treatment during their admission. Narratives shared indicated that participants did not feel slighted because of their anthropometrics and that everyone receives the same basic level of care. Most participants accepted the processes and policies of the hospital as "the way it is." The concerns are systemic and overall change is warranted. The data collected provides not only an understanding of the challenges faced in hospital, but also the daily obstacles encountered and how this impacts public health.

A Qualitative Study of People who are Morbidly Obese

Perceptions of Hospitalization

The inspirational true story of Karen Martin's triumph over adversity and illness is candidly and humorously written. Tormented throughout life by her sociopathic brother, Karen dealt with his wicked treatment of her with tenacity, grace, faith, and humor. While Karen's mother tried to deal with her son's depraved behavior, she was ill-equipped to do so. Karen's father was unwilling to even recognize his son's problems. Left to deal with her older clever and cunning brother by herself, Karen not only survived his treatment of her, but through faith, courage, hard work, and the loving support of her husband, she became a successful wife, mother, educator, and grandmother. Karen's optimistic attitude always found her confidently planning for a better future and then steadfastly coping with the many hindrances to her plans. Surviving two bouts with cancer while simultaneously dealing with several other family crises, Karen succeeded where many would have been defeated. Recognizing that God is always in control and that his design for her is greater than any plans she could make, Karen forged ahead with faith. Her amazing life story will have you marveling and laughing.

There Is a Time for Everything

My Plans, God's Design

Graeme Reid

Neville Wallace Hoad

This book tells how South Africa came to lead the world in enshrining sexual equality in our Bill of Rights, which forms part of the Constitution. The achievement, which has been hailed as a model for the rest of the world, did not come about without a long struggle. This was spearheaded by gender activists and movements during the 1980s, whose campaigns on the one hand evoked hostility from the apartheid state and were also dismissed as an irrelevance by conservative factions within the liberation movement. Indeed, the end of apartheid did not automatically guarantee that sexual equality would be realised, and the book explains how in the end this was achieved. The volume draws upon the rich archive of the Gay and Lesbian association and incorporates fascinating first-hand documents from the time as well as essays by participants in the events and later commentators.

Sex and Politics in South Africa

The cause of the number-one killer of apparently healthy infants between the ages of one week and one year—Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)—continues to defy science. This cruel mystery intensifies an already painful experience for bereaved parents, who frequently blame themselves for their baby’s death. This book explores how parents grieve, the meanings and casual explanations they attribute to a SIDS death, the effects of their grief on family relationships, and the strategies they use to cope and carry on. Karen Martin’s grounded theory study describes in detail the experiences of mothers and fathers whose babies died of SIDS ranging from less than one to over twenty-five years after the baby’s death. Her work makes an important contribution to health fields and to the social science of medicine, and is a critical resource for family doctors, public health nurses, counsellors, ministers, and all those working with grieving parents.

The Parents’ Grief and Search for Reason

When a Baby Dies of SIDS

In Queer Africa 2: New Stories, the 26 stories by writers from Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Uganda and the USA present exciting and varied narratives on life. There are stories on desire, disruption and dreams; others on longing, lust and love. The stories are representative of the range of human emotions and experiences that abound in the lives of Africans and those of the diaspora, who identify variously along the long and fluid line of the sexuality, gender and sexual orientation spectrum in the African continent. Centred in these stories and in their attendant relationships is humanity. The writers showcase their artistry in storytelling in thought-provoking and delightful ways.

Queer Africa 2: New Stories

Dancing the Labyrinth is a hero's journey. It is a dual time novel that weaves a contemporary story of a young woman from a violent background with the history of Europe's most advanced civilization of the Bronze Age - the Minoans. CRESSIDA is a young woman running from her brutal past.Decision-making was never a strong suit, but after the unexpected deaths of her parents, Cressida follows the sirens call, gambling on the chance that Crete, renowned for vivid sunlight, magnificent landscapes and turquoise seas, could erase the stranglehold of bleakness. Her newfound freedom is short lived. Falling pregnant, her overwhelming fear is that she will pass on her father's violent DNA.Sheltering in a cave during a violent storm, Cressida unearths a trove of ancient Minoan paintings. Awakening from a panic attack, she finds is not alone. LYDIA, a Minoan artisan, reveals stories contained in the paintings and Cressida learns of PYTHIA, a Minoan Priestess, who established a women's community to safeguard their ancient worship from an encroaching religion ordained by men. Shaken from her stupor by one of Crete's many earth tremors, Cressida escapes from the cave, stumbling back into her world where ANGELA, a local archaeologist, finds her distraught and in shock. When Cressida decides to accept that her vision in the cave was not a psychotic episode, she shares her discovery with Angela, and shows her the photographs of the paintings. Together they try to decipher the images and piece together Pythia's story. As Cressida peels away layers of time, she discovers courage, honesty, and friendship. She is compelled to confront her own truth within the story she has woven. The stories of old are the stories of today, and through the telling, Cressida awakens to a deeper understanding of herself. Dancing the Labyrinth is a young woman's odyssey. It is a celebration of women's history, strength, friendship, and hope.

Dancing the Labyrinth

Kaizen Events are an effective way to train organizations to break unproductive habits and adopt a continuous improvement philosophy while, at the same time, achieve breakthrough performance-level results. Through Kaizen Events, cross-functional teams learn how to make improvements in a methodological way. They learn how to quickly study a process,

Karen Martin

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