Karen Martin

Winner of The Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award! Align your leadership team to deliver the highest possible value to your customersToo 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 underusedmethodology--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 eliminateoperational 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 improvedwork systems. You'll learn how to:Prepare and engage your leadership team in the transformation processGain a deep understanding about your current work systems and the related barriers to delivering valueDesign a future state that enables outstanding performance on all frontsAdopt the new design and lay the foundation for continued improvementWhether 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 yourtransformation 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.

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, identify and prioritize improvement opportunities, implement change, and sustain their gains. Most importantly, they learn how to work with one another to solve problems rapidly and in a highly effective way. In The Kaizen Event Planner: Achieving Rapid Improvement in Office, Service, and Technical Environments, authors Karen Martin and Mike Osterling provide a practical how-to guide for planning and executing Kaizen Events in non-manufacturing settings, and conducting post-Event follow-ups to sustain the improvements made. Geared to continuous improvement professionals and leaders within the office areas of manufacturing, the service sector and knowledge-worker environments, this book provides the methodology and practical tools for generating measurable results, while building a motivated workforce and laying the foundation for continuous improvement. The Kaizen Event Planner provides those responsible for improving office, service, and technical processes with the skills to effectively scope the activity, engage the right people, and facilitate successful Events! Many Excel-based tools, which complement the lessons in this book, are found here under the "support materials" tab..

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.