Random Thoughts on Leadership and Life

Stories from helping organizations embrace New Ways of Working

In 2020, 50% of the global workforce will be millennials (people born approximately between 1982 and 2004). The millennial generation is one of the largest and best educated in history, and employees around the globe are therefore trying to understand how to attract the top millennial talents and make them stay. According to a survey of 4,364 graduates...

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Five whys is an effective questioning technique to identify the root of a problem. The idea is that by digging at least five levels deep into the initial issue, you uncover the real reason behind the problem. The technique is very simple, yet powerful. Unfortunately, many organizations have gotten proficient at asking “five whos” instead...

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Yesterday, my colleague, Kristian Haugaard (@haugaards), asked on our Ugilic Google hangout; Which book should a mid-level manager new to Agile read during the christmas holidays? My instinctive answer was Scrum for Managers: Management Secrets to Building Agile & Results-Driven Organizations by Rini van Solingen (@solingen) and Rob van Lanen (@robvanlanen). The book is a ‘how to...

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In two recent posts on the history of organizational development, I discussed Taylorism and the need for a new leadership paradigm, and the five levels of organizational consciousness discussed by Frederic Laloux in his book Reinventing Organizations. In this post, I will follow-up by discussing how Agile values and practices fit with the Evolutionary-Teal paradigm,...

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I’m passionate about Agile coaching and I’ve therefore decided to write a series of posts on the subject. In this first post I’ll lay the foundation by discussing what an Agile coach does. Agile coaches work at many different levels within organizations. At Ugilic, we differentiate between Transformation Coaches, Team Coaches, and Technical Coaches. Transformation...

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In my previous post, After 100 Years of Taylorism, We Need a New Leadership Paradigm, I discussed why Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management paradigm is no longer a winning strategy in today’s world. In this post, I want to put Taylor’s thinking into an evolutionary perspective by discussing the recent book Reinventing Organizations by Belgian...

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One of the discussions I often have with clients is on full-time versus part-time Scrum Masters. Often the arguments against a full-time Scrum Master is related to cost. Typically organizations have one project manager per project and they see it as double the cost having both a dedicated Product Owner and a dedicated Scrum Master on...

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