I know I'm a bit last minute with this one, but I just couldn't miss the opportunity to make sure you lovely readers are aware of an event being put on by our friends Lean Frontiers next week.

On Monday January 29, Lean Frontiers is hosting The Toyota Way to Service Excellence: An Online Event with our other friend Karyn Ross and her co-author Jeff Liker. I know, I know. We have great friends.

We've hosted a webinar with Karyn Ross before, called How to Coach for Creativity and Service Excellence, which you can watch here.

In the book The Toyota Way to Service Excellence, Liker and Ross refocus people on the idea that Lean isn’t a mechanistic set of tools to drive out cost and focus on end results, but rather, is a system to deeply understand each of your customer’s needs and then create the services that are going to address those needs. Doing so ensures that your company fulfills its purpose over the long term.

As Ross explained leading up to our webinar, creativity is a large part of this process but sadly, some people believe that they aren’t creative. Herself believing that creativity is the ability to combine and synthesize knowledge and experience rather than flashes of inspiration, Ross is confident people can rediscover or regain their creativity simply by practicing to use it. But while creativity can be rediscovered through practice, just like diet and exercise it’s a much easier process with a coach.

“If you think about service excellence and creating the peak service experiences that our customers really crave, that comes in two parts. The first part is you have to have an idea to do something differently to satisfy a customer. And then once you have that idea, you have to do something to turn that idea into reality,” Ross said. “And really, the 17 principles and four P’s of The Toyota Way to Service Excellence, and all of those Lean principles that we have - those are the way to turn ideas into reality. So, through coaching, and daily practice, what we can do is help people have ideas, then use those principles to turn them into reality. All with a customer focus at the fore.”

The 5.5 hour session with Lean Frontiers on Monday takes the lessons from the book and brings them to life. They suggest that you invite your team to watch the live presentations, so that you guys can ask questions and discuss what you've learned. They're recording the sessions too, so if you can't make it with such short notice, you won't miss out. This is a great opportunity to watch, digest, discuss, and strategize about exactly what the presentations means to you and your company. You’ll hear from the authors of The Toyota Way to Service Excellence, Jeff Liker & Karyn Ross, along with a select group of practitioners who will share with you their best practices and lessons learned.

Have you attended a Lean Frontiers event in the past? Leave a comment and tell us how it went!