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It has been some years, but I think the book that most opened my eyes on this was this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006IED92S/

I know less about them, but I also was really impressed by a talk from Bjarte Bogsnes about Beyond Budgeting. https://bbrt.org/




Thank you so very much! Appreciated...


Oh, and one way I've heard to express it is that most businesses are focused on costs and profits. But the right approach is to focus on value creation and waste.

So if I'm making hamburgers, the way to sustained profit isn't identifying my biggest cost (say, beef) and then cutting it. It's by identifying the biggest wastes and reducing them. So the first thing I do is to reduce beef inventory, so I'm not throwing out unused meat (or serving old meat, which also reduces customer value). I minimize overproduction, so I'm not tossing (or serving) staled cooked burgers. Maybe I change how the patty is made, because all things equal people like the look and flavor of a thinner but wider burger that peeps past the edge of he bun.

Similarly, I'd look at customer service as a way to maximize value delivered. Even if we make and sell a product that's in theory great, no value is delivered if a person can't figure out how to work it. So obviously, we need to help every person who buys it. But then we also look upstream in the process, to see how we can redesign the product and its experience so that customer support is less necessary. That in turn lets existing CS staff discover and mitigate less obvious problems.

Is that helpful?


Sure thing. Feel free to contact me via email or twitter DM if I can be of further service.




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