The Truth about Performance

Business901 Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems
Show me the Money – The Truth about Performance
Copyright Business901
Show Me the Money –
The Truth about Performance
Guest was Norm Meyer
Sponsored by
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Dean Meyer is one of the original
proponents of running shared-services
organizations within companies as
businesses within a business, where
every managerial group is an
entrepreneurship funded to produce
products and services for customers.
He has implemented this philosophy in
corporate, government, and non-profit
organizations through the careful
design of culture, organizational
structure, and internal market economics.
Dean is the author of seven books, numerous monographs,
countless articles, as well as the Full-cost Maturity Model. He
invented FullCost, a business and budget planning process based
on an internal product/service costing solution. He researched the
science of organizational structure, captured in his Structural
Cybernetics framework and reorganization process. He developed
an approach to corporate culture that leads to meaningful change
in less than a year. Dean coaches executives on organizational
and political issues, and personally facilitates transformation
processes.
From a small office in the New England village of Ridgefield,
Connecticut, Dean Meyer writes, invents, coaches leaders, and
implements organizational transformation -- all based on 30
years of devotion to the business-within-a-business paradigm.

Transcription of Podcast
Joe Dager: Welcome everyone! This is Joe Dager, the host of
the Business901 podcast. With me, today is Dean Meyer. He is
one of the original proponents of running shared services
organizations within companies as business within a business,
where every managerial group is entrepreneurship funded to
produce products and services for customers. Dean is the author
of seven books. He invented “Full Cost”, a business and budget
planning process based on internal product service costing
solutions, and he’s researched the science of organizational
structure captured in his structural cybernetics framework and
reorganization processes. His latest book is “Internal Market
Economics”, which is one of those books that raise as many
questions in my mind as it did answers, and that is meant as a
compliment. Dean, I would like to welcome you, and could you
start by giving the elevator speech about you and your company,
NDMA?
Dean Meyer: Thanks for having me on your podcast! The
elevator speech, well as you pointed out I am a long-time
proponent, one of the earliest proponents of funding
organizations as a business within a business. What I mean by
that is not just that the IT as a whole is a business, but every
managerial group, every manager should think like an
entrepreneur running a little business within a business. What I
do for a living is help executives -- CIOs and their leadership
teams, for example, implement that vision systemically. That is
through changing the organizational ecosystem, or the
organizational environment that we all live in. So I work on three
things. I work on culture, which is contrary to popular opinion,
the easiest thing to fix. Structure, which is a very mature science,
I get myself into trouble on airplanes sometimes, I’ll be sitting

next to a guy, and they find out I’m a student of structure, they
say oh let me show you my organization chart! I’ll say well, this
guy’s fighting with this guy, this guy’s not making objectives, that
guy has ulcers. It is that predictable! So it is also a dangerous
science because the guy gets all upset, I deny all of that, “Who
have you been talking to?” and then they do not talk to me for
the rest of the flight, so I guess that’s okay. Structure is my
longest standing area of research. Then most recently, just the
last 15 years or so ago, I’ve been studying the application of
market economics inside of companies that sort out the resource
governance and financial processes. That is what I do for a living:
culture, structure, and the internal economy.
Joe: Well your new book, “Internal Market Economics”; I guess
I’d like to start out there. Can you tell me your target audience
for the book?
Dean: I’ve targeted not just to my traditional audience which
would be CIOs and their leadership teams but to any shared
service organization and to CFOs who are considering how the
whole company works. The internal economy includes things like
budgeting, catalogue with rates, governance processes, charge-
backs or show-backs if any, all of those financial mechanisms.
The way it looks to me in a lot of companies is we’ve designed all
those processes around a central Soviet approach; some sort of
committee handing out money and telling you what to do with it.
What I’ve been trying to teach through that book and through my
work over the last 15 years is market economics, where
customers decide what they buy within the limits of a finite
checkbook, and suppliers like IT or any shared service
organization strive to be the vendor of choice offering best value
and great customer relationships. So that’s what internal market
economics is about.
Joe: On my first pass through it and I don’t think it’s one that

you’re going to make one pass through if you read the book, I
think you’re going to make a couple -- it seems to be a budgetary
way of determining structure. Is that way out of focus?
Dean: I think you’re right, that’s very insightful. When we fix
the internal economy, there are two pieces to it: there is a
planning piece and then there’s the actual side. Once a year
during the planning piece, we lock down or revise the catalogue.
We forecast what we’re going to sell, not only to clients outside
the shared service organization but to one another, and then we
figure out how we’re going to fulfill those sales which is where
cost comes into the equation. Driving that through a very
advanced cost model, well beyond ABC, we come out with two
things. we come out with what I call investment-based budget, a
budget for what you want to sell, not what you want to spend.
Not a budget for compensation, travel, training, you’re just
begging for micromanagement that way -- but a budget for the
products and services.
In IT, for example, you want help testing 24/7 multilingual.
Happy to do it, here’s the price. Oh gee, can’t afford that? What
do you want to do? Sixteen hours a week, English only, whatever
you’d like. So, it totally changes the budget negotiation, it
changes the dialogue with the business, budget decisions are
made on the investment opportunities at hand and the of the
business rather than last year plus or minus a percentage, and
we come out of the budget with a very clear understanding of
what is expected of you for a given level of funding. Oh, and we
also come out with rates that go back on the catalogue, that is
the unit cost. But in order to do all that, Joe, just as you intuit it,
we’ve got to understand every manager’s group as a business
within a business to figure out their catalogue and what they sell
to one another as well as to clients. So while, the full cost process
-- that’s what I call it, and you can check this out on FullCost.com
-- the full cost process doesn’t itself change the structure, it uses

the structural cybernetics framework, the building blocks of
structure, to decipher what business everybody’s in as a basis for
business planning.
Joe: I come from the Lean world -- when we look at innovation,
when we look at a business and how we’re going to grow a
business, we think about people, processes, and products.
Everybody looks at the budget and the finance side as the
restrictive side. But, come back from your book, and it’s the way
you go about it!
Dean: It’s the enabler, it’s not the restriction.
Joe: Yeah! Do a lot of people look at it the same way I do?
Dean: I think a lot of people are used to the traditional
approach to budgeting and resource governance. The traditional
approach goes something like this: Joe, you submit your budget,
and it’s for compensation, travel, training, etc. Of course, CFO
and executive, they’ve got to talk about something, so they say,
Joe you don’t need all that travel, do you? So there they are
trying to micromanage you, trying to make decisions they’re not
qualified to make, you’re having totally the wrong discussion with
your peers. It’s a discussion defending your costs, rather than
treating IT as an investment opportunity. And then at the end of
the day, we give you less than you ask for, but it’s still a lot of
money to us, and in trade for that, we clients get to scream at
you for anything we can dream of all year long, and it’s your fault
if you can’t provide infinite service on a fixed budget. Is that a
setup or what, man? It’s crazy! And it’s not the way the real
world works, right? The way the real world works is, you go to
the store, it’s not like you pay the manager for your share of the
rent and the checkout clerk and then you get to help yourself to
whatever the cart will hold. No, the products and services have
prices, you know how much is in your wallet, you know what you

can afford, and you optimize your family’s well-being by buying
what you most need and leaving behind the rest.
That’s how it should work in budgeting. And then throughout the
year, in the resource governance process, what we’re looking at
is a process where the executive team has to decide how much to
fund -- let’s use IT as an example for today -- how much to fund
IT based on what they want to buy from IT. Then we leave the
budget discussion with a very clear understanding of what’s
funded, and those processes, those services and products that
they've chosen are fully funded. It is not as we’ve got to make up
time and money out of thin air or rob Peter to pay Paul. The few
things we do, we do well, and the rest aren’t expected. So I think
it’s going to improve our processes and improve effectiveness,
improve quality, improve our sanity, by fully funding the few
things we want to do well. Does that make sense?
Joe: One of the things that jump out at me when you say that is
the old saying that people act; by the way, they are measured.
But what you’re saying is people really act the way the money is
budgeted.
Dean: Remember Deep Throat? Follow the money! Exactly
right, exactly right. I think if we want to align IT with strategy,
we fund those deliverables that have a direct impact on strategy,
and we don’t fund the boring stuff. Now, 70 or 80% of the budget
goes to keeping the lights on, that’s true, but maybe our business
clients are willing to turn some lights off in order to free up
funding for more strategic things. So it’s a win-win. We serve the
business better, and we’re more important to the business, and
our lives are saner. We’re not expected to deliver a Rolls Royce
for the price of a Chevrolet.
Joe: One of the things I probably struggled a little bit in your
books is defining some of the nomenclature in the book. You use

“customers” and “clients” in a little different way. Can you explain
how you use those words?
Dean: I’m glad you asked, not only because we need to have
our terms straight to understand one another because there is a
subtlety here that’s important. I’m going to use the word “client”
to mean people outside your organization. If we’re talking about
IT, it’s a new word for user. Anybody outside of IT is a client. I
use “customer” and “supplier” to speak of a relationship. So those
clients may be customers to you, but there are also clients that
may be suppliers to you. And here’s the key: one manager within
IT may look at another manager within IT as a customer or as a
supplier. So, customer and supplier work within the context of
relationship, whether we’re talking about two people within IT or
IT and clients out there in the business.
That concept is powerful in its implications for teamwork. Let’s
say a client comes along and buys something, well based on a
clear structure we know exactly who in our organization sells that
product or service to the client. When I say sell I don’t
necessarily mean that money changes hands, I’m not advocating
charge-backs. I’m talking figuratively as a business within a
business, okay? So when one manager sells something to a
client, let’s call that the prime contractor, and the first thing the
prime does is a subcontract with peers within IT, other groups
within IT, for help. If, it’s an application project, they may need
to subcontract, for some data analysts, to do a logical data model
or some DBMS experts to do the physical data model. They may
subcontract with the project management team.
Then one applications engineer may subcontract with another for
a data feed. We may subcontract with operations for installation
into production. Of course, each of those subs may in turn
subcontract for help from others and so on, and so through this
process and through the concept of entrepreneurship within the

organization, teams form automatically, laterally. We’re
subcontracting for deliverables not just warm bodies. We have
clear individual accountability, and a clear chain of command. And
in that way we can assemble processes fluidly and dynamically.
It’s not like an assembly line where you define the process, and
we do the same thing day after day. Each project’s a little
different, and yet we get just the right people at just the right
time.
Joe: In your book you talk about systems and tools and a few
other things, but your example I believe on what may be the plan
or the org structure is not your typical org structure, it looks like
more of a cluster diagram where you have different people
responsible, all these different people and different roles, or a
value network type drawing.
Dean: Well I don’t by any means mean to say that we’re
getting rid of hierarchy. I always draw org charts as a hierarchy;
you’ve got to know who your boss is. But I may have portrayed
the building blocks of structure as a sort of clustered concepts,
but the process of restructuring takes that language, that
framework of the building blocks of structure and assembles that
in to a traditional organization chart.
Joe: Is this model counter-intuitive? Is this something that you
have to struggle with, or is it something that once you
understand it it flows?
Dean: I think there’s a little struggle at first, but you know
they say “Common sense is what you learned yesterday?” Once it
clicks, it’s going to be so obvious, it’s just what we observe in the
real world. Shall I give you an example?
Joe: Sure.

Dean: Do you know the difference, Joe, between Boeing and
American Airlines? Of course, you do. Boeing makes planes;
American buys planes, runs them, and sells the transportation
service, right? You see that same sort of relationship; look at
Ford vs. Hertz Rent a Car. Look at Hewlett Packard vs. AOL. Look
at Cisco vs. Telco. If you look at any technology, you’ll see some
businesses that are essentially engineering businesses that are
there to design, build, repair, and support solutions. Whether that
solution is a piece of infrastructure, or an application, there are
other businesses that may buy that solution, own it, and run it,
and sell use thereof to others. We have a group of infrastructure
engineers who sell boxes to another entrepreneur, infrastructure
operations that in turn uses those boxes to sell cycles or sell
storage or sell telecommunications services. Pretty obvious in the
real world; you understand the difference, right Joe?
Joe: Yeah, that’s an excellent description, because you’re saying
the same thing happens internally.
Dean: Exactly! And, by the way, you know there is a huge,
huge difference between an engineering company and a services
company. They’re both entrepreneurships, they’re both vibrant
and interesting and creative, but they’re real different in their
business models and their cultures and their competencies and so
on. Within IT, what happens if you mix up infrastructure
engineering and infrastructure operations? I was talking to one
group out in Californian, and we were going around the room
identifying our lines of business, and this guy said, well I do
database. And I said, you probably mean DBMS. He said, yeah
DBMS. So I said okay, are you Boeing or American? Are you Cisco
or Telco? And he said, yes. Both, right? He was the DBMS
engineer, and DBMS operations. And you might guess what that
looked like! First of all, operations had none of the discipline that
we expect in the glass house. Essentially, he was running it under
his desk.

Meanwhile, he was using very expensive engineers to do stuff
that $20/hr. operators should be doing. It dragged those
engineers down into the day-to-day detail, when they should
have been out there being creative about the next generation,
searching big data and so on. In doing so, it made those
engineers since they're responsible for keeping things running
smoothly, a little reluctant to innovate, because innovation
disrupts smooth operations. So by mixing up under the category
of infrastructure of DBMS or whatever, by mixing up Boeing and
American, the engineers and the operators, we’ve created all
kinds of problems. That’s bad structure.
Joe: I’m sitting here and the reason I’m quiet is because I’m
taking in all this. It’s great.
Dean: Well, you know why people do it -- I mean it sounds so
obvious, but you know why people do it? If the engineers don’t
respect the operators as a customer if HP doesn’t look at AOL as
a customer, if instead Hewlett Packard says, I’m going to be the
one that decides what goes on the floor of AOL’s data center, and
I get to play with all this new tech stuff, so I’m going to put all
kinds of crazy wild stuff in there, then there’s absolutely no
chance AOL can run operations reliably. So if, you don’t have that
internal customer-supplier relationship and respect that goes with
it, then things fall apart. Teamwork falls apart. So then we say,
well, put them all under the same person, and that way we’ll at
least get something done. So the lesson there is that you can’t
specialize -- and specialization’s key, specialization allows you to
be good at something -- you can’t specialize if you can’t team.
You’re going to have to mix up these different lines of business if
you can’t team well across boundaries.
Joe: That measure of trust is what we might call financial
transparency. It is realizing the cost that exists between each
other.

Dean: It is that. And you just mentioned trust, which is an
outcome of culture, the way we behave around here. If we
behave in ways that inspire trust, then people learn to trust one
another. For example, we never make a commitment that we
can’t keep, and we keep every commitment. That’s a cultural
principle. We respect internal customers just as much as clients
as customers, again, a culture principle. Culture’s part of it, the
money’s part of it, what if my highest priority is your lowest; they
are all part of it. Well, we may be good buddies and quite willing
to work together, but if my highest priority is your lowest, I’m not
going to get any work out of you, am I? That would be an internal
economy problem. Or, the problem could have its root problem in
the structure. It could be that we’ve designed groups that don’t
even know that their customers are peers within the
organization; they’re strictly focused on selling outside. All three
of those things work in concert to create that business within a
business environment.
Joe: Is there a way to do something like this incrementally, or do
you just have to change?
Dean: Well in the area of structure, I hate to ruin your
morning, Joe, but doing incremental change in structure is like
picking at a scab. How’s that for a graphic metaphor? It just
keeps the wound open: when is the next change going to hit me,
what’s going to happen, it keeps the whole organization
destabilized, and the other thing it does is it keeps everybody
defending their little territories, you’re not taking that away from
me, that’s mine! Whereas, a clean sheet of paper approaches to
structure, while it sounds scary, is actually less painful. It goes a
little more quickly, and it is far more effective. So you can use
the structural cybernetics framework, it’s all outlined in that little
blue book I sent you, “The Building Blocks Approach to
Organization Charts”, you can use that to tweak your current

structure, a little bit here, a little bit there if that’s all it needs.
But if you’re planning year after year of tweaks, you’d be far
better off to stop, engage a leadership team in a participative
clean sheet of paper process, and be done with it once and for all.
Joe: So you’re saying you need to go all-in.
Dean: I think that’s by far the most effective. It is oddly
enough, least painful. See when you’re going clean sheet of
paper, you don’t have a rice bowl to defend, right? Everybody’s
out of a job, everybody’s going to get a job at the end of the
process, but now we’re all sitting with the CIO trying to figure out
what the future will look like on a clean sheet. Whereas if you’re
doing horse trading with your peers, I’ll give you this, you give
me that, it's constant defensiveness and sub-optimization.
Joe: When I start thinking business within a business and about
the different things you say, the first thing it sounds like is I’m
creating more structure and more -- that terrible word, maybe --
paperwork, to implement all this because of budgeting and
understanding the cost associated with everything. Is that true?
Dean: I don’t think it’s entirely true, but there’s some
additional work involved. It’s like if look at our marketing
economy, people do have to issue invoices and write checks. I
guess that’s not quite as simple as a central soviet that just
determines what every factory produces and gives them the
money to do it. But obviously we all believe in market economics,
at least outside the office, and that paperwork and invoicing and
paying bills and such doesn’t seem like a big obstacle. I think we
can make those administrative processes of market economics
very streamline, very efficient, and the benefits are just so, so
outstanding. By the way, you need charge-backs to implement
market economics. As I point out in that new book, “Internal
Market Economics”, we can create most of the benefits of market

economics without charge-backs. It doesn’t need to entail a
whole lot of bureaucracy. It’s the opposite of bureaucracy; it
should be much more fluid, customer-driven, and
entrepreneurial.
Joe: Now, you wrote like I said earlier, seven books, and most of
them were more the handbook style of the book. Why did you
change the format and publish what I would call a more
traditional book with “Internal Market Economics”?
Dean: Interesting. “Internal Market Economics” is the
capstone of the last 15 years of not just study but practical
experience out there implementing it. I found that I had to, like
the little books that you mentioned, I had to teach a concept to
an executive in one airplane ride, but I also had to explain a lot of
detailed mechanics for the people who are out there actually
building those processes; designing the budget process,
designing the governance process, and so on. So the book is two
in one; the front part is meant to explain the vision of market
economics inside of companies, and the implications of that
vision. Implications for things like metrics and sourcing and
shared services and cost management and so on. So that’s kind
of the executive portion of the book. And then the back half of
the book is how you actually go about implementing it, right on
down to the gory detail of the systems; there’s whole systems
architecture in there and the processes that you need to design to
make it happen. So it’s a full size book, this one. It’s more than
one airplane ride.
Joe: Right. I enjoyed the fact that you actually changed the type
of page when you shifted from one to the other, and the two
parts, because it automatically frames you in what you’re actually
looking at and thinking about at the time. “Oh, I’m on a yellow
page now, so I understand”, or it’s a beige, or whatever.

Joe: I see Lean companies discussing value streams, where the
organizations are designed around a particular value stream, a
more decentralized approach. Does internal market economics
conflict with that model?
Dean: Absolutely not, in fact, it prices out that value stream
and points out where we are the best value and where perhaps
we should consider sourcing alternatives, where the process gets
expensive, is an area where perhaps Lean should be applied.
Lean works best, in my understanding, when you have a pretty
well-structured process, a value chain from raw materials to the
final product that happens day after day, fairly routine and well
structured. When you get into a white collar setting like IT,
you’ve got a variety of skills that mix and match in unique
combinations on every project. Sure there are some methods that
they have in common, but it’s not an assembly line.
So the challenge is far more difficult, it’s getting just the right
talent on every team at just the right time, and engaging them in
just the right accountabilities for each unique project. On the
services side of IT, even there while it’s more routine, the
diversity of services is such that we’re taking the same basic
capabilities, infrastructure, and talents, and mixing and matching
them to produce a whole variety of services. Whether it’s a virtual
data center, or Windows instances, or Linux instances, or storage,
all of these things are often sharing talent and sharing
infrastructure. Getting all those combinations to work right is not
a matter of a simple assembly line. So the beauty of market
economics -- well, the whole business within a business paradigm
-- is that it allows you to recombine the same set of skills in a
variety of ways for different projects and services. That way
people can really specialize in their particular competency and
serve multiple processes and not be embedded in a single
process.

Joe: Dean, would you explain how you perceive Lean and your
model fitting together?
Dean: Once we have done enough of these walkthroughs so
that we know who’s prime and whose sub on all these different
kinds of projects and services, you’re going to start to see some
subroutines, as it were. You’re going to see some “prime goes to
sub goes to another sub” happening again and again. As soon as
you see those patterns, then it would be worthwhile to come in
and with the more traditional Lean toolset, look at how that flows
and see if that can be optimized. Then you can come in and with
the traditional toolset optimize those processes. I think a
wonderful example of that is the DevOps movement, which is not
making a recommendation about structure.
I think the spirit of Lean is right on. It’s exactly what we need.
The tools that the Lean community began with came from, I
think, a manufacturing world of routine, well-structured
processes. I hope what I’m offering here is another toolset that
pursues that same spirit of entrepreneurship and best value and
proper treatment of people. A toolset that applies, in cases where
you have complex processes that are different each time and
where we’ve got to re-combine skills, the same set of skills in
many different processes at once, essentially, the white collar
world.
Dean: Yes, the white pages are the executive concepts, and
the back buff colored pages, those are the details for the
implementers.
Joe: When you look at this type of process, who needs to be the
driver of it? Does it need to be the CFO, or the CIO? Who’s the
driver of this, who needs to take hold of it?

Dean: Ah, well, if you’re going to attempt a significant
restructuring, obviously this is got to be an executive decision. So
a CIO or a C-level, whatever your function and the leadership
team at the next level, really has to want to do this. I don’t think
a C-level can force this on a leadership team that isn’t prepared.
It just won’t work right. Everything I do is done in a participative
way. So we’ve got to engage the leadership team because they
know how things really work and they’ve got to buy in to make it
work. So it becomes a significant transformation project at that
level to get it right. But with that said, I think everybody, even
entry level if they start thinking of their jobs as entrepreneurial
and understanding what their products and services are and who
their customers and suppliers are, if you just start thinking that
way, and start behaving that way, you’re going to succeed better.
It’s going to help you. I would say the concepts apply to everyone
all the time at every level. The transformation requires leadership
team commitment.
Joe: Is there a certain type of company that benefits from this
model, and maybe another type of company that shouldn’t try
this model?
Dean: I haven’t seen that, to be honest. I’ve implemented the
business within a business paradigm through all of those
dimensions -- culture, structure, and internal economy -- I’ve
implemented that in the federal government, state government,
local government, not for profit, charity, as well as a bunch of
corporations around the United States, Canada, and Guatemala.
People are people, and human nature is what it is. The principles
we’re talking about are the way we treat people and the way we
set up an environment in which people work with one another
and prosper. And I don’t think that varies by industry. Certainly
the content of their work is going to change, but the
organizational issues seem to be pretty much the same wherever
I go.

Joe: I found the books, and your books, even the ones written in
the 90’s are very interesting because they’re people books. You
first pick them up thinking you’re going to get more of this
structure, this elaborate structure, and all this other stuff, but
they’re about people and interactions between people.
Dean: Absolutely right. I think of organizations as machines
that send signals to people that guide their behavior day by day.
Not that, people are machines, not by any means, but the
organizational ecosystem we all live in is a fairly predictable
environment. And it sends signals that either guide people to do
good stuff or bad stuff. Let me give you an example. Let’s say I
tell you we’ve got to run lean and mean, we’ve got to save
money, I need you to conserve head count, I need you to focus
on value and keep your budget down. But, let me explain in this
fictitious company, your title, your political clout, your ability to
get things done, in fact, your salary and benefits, all depend on
how big of an empire you run.
Well, what would a rational person do? You wave your arms
about saving money, and you build empires! That’s what we’re
paying you to do. That’s an example of a perverse signal built
into that ecosystem that would cause great people to do the
wrong thing. So we say well, let’s get this guy Joe out of here,
he’s not a team player, he’s building his empire instead of
teaming, bring in a more capable person. What’s the more
capable person going to do? Build empires faster. It’s systemic.
My focus, throughout the 30 years of my career, has been on
identifying where those signals come from, and I believe the first
and foremost job of a great leader is designing an organization in
which everyone can succeed with or without her, by
systematically programing those organizational systems. And the
big three -- culture, structure, and internal economy -- are the

transformational ones. They determine the character, the shape,
the feel of an organization. There are two minor dimensions --
methods and tools – IT, for example, would be, the best
practices, and last, metrics and rewards, the dashboards. You
know the people who say, you want to fix it, measure it? Those
are the people who are doing minor change. Change on the
margin, not transformation. Because in fact, those are used to
lock down the new paradigm and to fine tune it over time. So the
big three, culture, structure, and internal economy, create the
shape of the organization. Methods and tools, metrics and
rewards, come later for institutionalizing and fine tuning.
Joe: What is upcoming for you? Do you offer some webinars or
some different structure for people to learn more?
Dean: I love teaching, and I love implementing, so I’m always
happy to meet someone on the phone, I do executive coaching, I
sometimes come in and do a workshop, typically within an
organization or a webinar for an organization, and ultimately for
the great leaders who are out to build a legacy of a great
organization, I work side by side with them on implementing all
of these concepts. I’m involved in implementing Full Cost, that’s
the planning part of internal market economics, in a couple of
organizations right now. I’m working on the structure in another
organization for the CEO. There’s always a new challenge out
there.
Joe: What’s the best way for someone to contact you?
Dean: I love hearing from people! Email us or give us a call.
Joe: And your website is. . .
Dean: The website is NDMA.com. If you are interested in
internal market economics go to FullCost.com. In both cases,

you’ll see a navigation bar on how to contact us. Let me hear
from you! I love talking about this stuff, I love hearing what
you’re grappling with and helping you figure out what your next
steps might be.
Joe: I do have to recommend your “Building Blocks Approach for
Organization Charts”. The deeper dive, “The Internal Market
Economics” book is excellent, and I went through it thinking, I’m
going to browse through this and do an interview and stuff, and I
found myself caught up in it, there’s a lot to digest in it! I think
this is a book that I’m going to have around for a couple months
on the side of my desk.
Dean: Thank you for saying that Joe, I’m honored! Behind
these things is what I call studies. So for a leader who’s actually
ready to implement it, you know that little blue book, what is it
110 pages? That gives you the basics of structural cybernetics;
the lines of business within organizations, those questions on how
to combine the building blocks into a great organization chart,
how to build the processes, it gives you an overview. Behind that
is an 800 page study that we use for actually implementing the
process. “Internal Economics”, what does that come out to, 370
pages, behind that are studies, multiple studies for various
modules within that framework for implementation.
When we actually implement transformations, it is a fine process;
here’s a workshop, here’s a homework assignment, here’s
another workshop; and here’s all the documentation to go with
every step of the process. These are tested processes.
Joe: I do appreciate it. The podcast will be available on the
Business901 blog site, and the Business901 iTunes store. Thanks
again, Dean.
Dean: Thank you Joe, it’s been fun talking to you.

Joseph T. Dager
Business901
Phone: 260-918-0438
Skype: Biz901
Fax: 260-818-2022
Email: jtdager@business901.com
Website: http://www.business901.com
Twitter: @business901
Joe Dager is president of Business901, a firm specializing in
bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and
marketing arena. He takes his process thinking of over thirty
years in marketing within a wide variety of industries and applies
it through Lean Marketing and Lean Service Design.
Visit the Lean Marketing Lab: Being part of this community will
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