Prologue: Channels

You now know why an organization ought to lean metaphysically toward who people are. This business model should help any organization think well about how to set up a House of Quality. Leanism concludes by better describing management’s upper-ontology and what and how it ought to be reproduced. You must proceed downward through the divisions of the U/People business model toward in-fact uniquely/profitably extending and optimizing people’s lives and existences for the highest profit. Leanism channels all businesses’ upper-management/ontology in the following way:

Value Stream 6: People’s, Chief Meaning Officer (CMO)

– Marketing

The Chief Meaning Officer addresses Lean marketing as the business discipline investigating who customers are and why they want to consume products and/or services. The CMO is charged with describing how the Lean true-north value discussed in “Existence,” “Lives” and “People’s” value streams generates money meaningfully through the normative value that products and/or services produce by solving problems in exchange for the prices that people pay.

Marketers inconsistently define value in Lean business contexts, with some defining value as what people like and do, and others defining value as what people will pay—with Lean true-north value generally being the vaguest concept of all.¹ I hope this matter is perfectly clear at this point of the U/People business model, while you think about what Lean, true-north value truly means. Organizational leaders, if not all employees, really need to understand Lean value to lead their organizations toward producing desirable products and/or services, i.e. the structured matter and energy pulled from and flowed to consumers to solve their deepest problems. Thus, a CMO applies people’s previously defined normative, real and personal values to become a marketer who better identifies and measures true-north value and leans more meaningfully toward all people.

Value Stream 7: Optimizing, Chief Optimization Officer (COO)

– Operations, G.C., People Services

The Chief Optimization Officer functions to operate Lean business processes, guiding how a business reproduces salable products and/or services. The COO avoids all forms of waste by optimizing procurement, production, and human resources with the support of other guiding functions like the General Counsel that place systemic boundaries on what is possible. The COO optimizes the meaning that Lean products and/or services produce overall. The COO examines how an organization’s internal stakeholders’ normatively true and real values may be aligned with what customers truly value for greater business effect across all supporting departments. The COO’s optimization thus focuses true-north human value streams within the Lean business processes of energizing stakeholders, functioning finance, and uniquely innovating products and/or services.

Value Stream 8: Extending, Chief Energization Officer (CEO)

– Stakeholder Management

The Chief Energization Officer sits in the middle of the organizational Gemba, right where s/he reproduces Lean true-north value for customers, while always thinking about how to charge customers more effectively. With the guiding support and alignment of the CMO, COO, CFO, and IDEO, the latter two functions being further described below, the CEO leans toward people by energizing and extending their lives and meaning by solving their existential problems. The CEO does this by aligning sales and marketing, talent recruitment, employee motivation, legal operations, accounting, financial investment, research and development, design, innovation and strategy toward a business’ end-goal of making money meaningfully. The CEO is thus the most energy-centric of all employees by aligning the energy of all others toward expanding the volume and velocity of what customers and other stakeholders most truly value. CEOs do this by best understanding why and how all people do what they do.

Just as marketing assesses and measures customers’ normatively true and subjectively real values upward and through these activities, the CEO in-turn identifies, measures and aligns his or her organization’s lean energy with what the IDEO, CFO, COO, and CMO determine creates the most Lean true-north value for customers. This insight allows the CEO to produce the most optimized, unique and profitable products and/or services that customers want to buy to expand the company’s bottom line.

Value Stream 9: Profitably, Chief Function Officer (CFO)

– Finance, Accounting, Treasury

The Chief Function Officer guides the CEO by equating what customers truly value to money or other objective Lean performance metrics. This gives the CFO a haloed rôle in any organization. Accounting and finance measure the monetary value generated within customers’ lives and existences as developed through meaningful marketing, optimized operations, and expansive procurement of new products, investments and people. The CFO measures an organization’s net value and how that organization may best lean toward what customers most meaningfully value in exchange for what price you charge them.

People’s profitability explains how an organization can more effectively skew customers’ existential reality and fundamental needs with the concept of profit as a relative change in customers’ standard of existence. The CFO functions as a natural construct of the realities revolving around the monetary measurement of customers’ true-north value streams within a Lean business ideology.

Value Stream 10: Uniquely, Chief Information, Innovation & Design Officer (IDEO)

– IT, Strategy, R&D, Creatives

Finally, the Zen-like Chief information, Innovation, Design Officer uniquely optimizes customers’ lives and existences over all customer segments by meaningfully marketing, optimizing operations, and functionally analyzing product strategies. The IDEO is an organization’s turning point and reflection of its true-north knowledge and power.²

The information function of the IDEO coheres what people value with what form of Lean products an organization reproduces for profit. Information also directs what whole organizations ought to lean toward within their business ideologies. The IDEO fully recognizes that all products are fundamentally phenomenological information to customers however they experience when they consume. Customers interpret this information received from Lean products as either good or bad. This perception informs how a business ideology leans its organization toward innovation and profitable success.

The innovation an IDEO produces replaces what products consumers used with what more leanly extends and optimizes consumers’ lives and existences. Consumers’ quintessential problem of existence never changes, while innovation entirely improves what makes customers’ lives upwardly mobile. Design, on the other hand, symbolically describes the form, function and consumption of Lean products in ways that extend and optimize consumers’ highest values, particularly in regards to how money semiotically represents those values. The IDEO thus bridges Lean Thinking and Systems Thinking with Design Thinking across the 3WH Socratic value identification interrogatories.

The “Uniquely” part of what IDEOs do in the U/People business model thus analyzes all of an organization’s Lean channels in SUDS leading to specific SLOTS so a business ideology may most meaningfully increase the degree of consumers’ standard of existing, which causes them to push money back down in exchange. The IDEO is charged with leaning organizations toward an evolved method of business strategic analysis by applying the U/People business model for the greatest business results and competitive advantage while serving stakeholders’ normative, monetary and really personal true-north values.

For each of these positions within the U/People value stream leaning toward all other people, I finally ask you to consider the following questions: