“You are definitely not a finisher,” responded my wife over lunch after I had explained the Working Geniuses model to her. To make her point clear, she followed up by giving me a couple of examples of projects I have enthusiastically started but haven’t gotten around to finishing (yet). A completely unnecessary elaboration if you...
Organizations often start their Agile journeys by forming one or more teams. One of the “rules” of Agile is that a team needs to be cross-functional (able to perform all the work, from analysis to production, on their own). Many pre-Agile organizations consist mainly of specialists with very narrow but deep skill sets. It is...
When building a high-performing Agile team, or any team for that matter, you need to look at people as more than “resources”. If they were just “resources”, their contribution would be merely additive. It therefore always saddens me when I hear managers talk about employees as “resources”. Even more depressing, is when the people making up...
In recent years, I have used the new year to reflect on the events of the previous year. I will try something different this year and look ahead instead. In this post, I will discuss five megatrends currently shaping the workplace and why I think Agile leadership can help us cope with them. Trend 1:...
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,...
Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman recently announced that she wants everyone to work at the office saying, “During this critical turnaround period, HP needs all hands on deck”. Although it’s not an outright ban, like the one Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced back in February, she is still sending a very clear message to employees. The...
I recently visited a large and prestigious project. The project had already experiences massive overruns on initial estimates and was trying to grasp the situation by re-estimating the remaining work. Re-estimating a project as such is not necessarily a bad idea, but in this case, the team were doing it for the fourth time in...
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