Corporate social responsibility isn’t just good for people and the planet: CSR helps shareholders, too, according to a direct comparison of similar companies. Researchers at the Harvard and London business schools carefully paired 90 companies that followed CSR practices with 90 similar firms that did not. For example, their journal article says, “the two groups …
“One bad apple spoils the barrel.” So says an English proverb going back to the 1300s, and literally true: As an apple spoils, it releases gases that speed the process in adjacent ones.[1] Using that as a metaphor for business ethics, three researchers wondered, to what degree do the apple (individual), barrel (organization), or the …
One of the many business myths I have been fighting for two decades is that results from (often unscientific) personality tests are valid for someone’s entire career. On average, personality changes about 25% over one’s lifetime. New evidence shows environmental factors can speed up those changes. An international team of researchers analyzed data on 7,109 …
One of the great mysteries from my 35 years of working life is why workers who “everyone knows” is trouble not only keep their jobs, but sometimes get promoted. Their bad behavior is talked about all the time by line workers and other managers, yet they stay employed. I wrote years ago about one answer. …
Anyone who, as part of their job, tries to get individual workers or managers to cooperate, has dealt with people who feel they can accomplish more on their own. Sometimes openly, more often without admitting it, they follow their own agendas. The science in this post may or may not be useful in persuading them …
In a recent social media discussion, someone stated that the founder of Kanban would not consider it “agile.” I don’t doubt that, and I know some Agilists say Kanban was/is only Lean and not agile. My belief that Kanban is an agile method is based on the way it is taught for use in offices …
More than a dozen managers get together to discuss what isn’t working in their industry, especially given rapid market and technology changes they all face, and come out with a set of principles around responding quickly to those changes. No, I’m not talking about the Agile Manifesto of 2001. This was the “Agile Manufacturing Enterprise …
Motivational speakers do nothing for me—and most people, for very long. I have met people who say one of these well-intended folks changed their lives, but the research on learning suggests those are rare. More typically, the impact is to make people feel good for a short period, and at best create a very short-term …
As an experiment, make yourself read through the next paragraph without responding in your head. Just absorb it. Imagine a working world where line managers have 50 to 70 direct reports, made manageable because the teams are self-directing and include all functions needed to complete the work. Team members handle their own quality control, maintenance, …
Skeptics of Agile—myself among them—are indebted to Dwight (“Ike”) Eisenhower, U.S. president from 1953–61. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military industrial complex,” he said that last year. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”1 From this was coined …
At diversity conferences, I sometimes hear statistics like, “in the United States, a woman earns roughly 77 dollars for every 100 dollars earned by a man.” As someone trying to be an ally on diversity, I cringe. In my head, I hear all the objections male executives use to ignore fair pay issues. The gap …
“…we must analyse whether the corporation is satisfying these basic demands: the promise that opportunities be equal and rewards be commensurate to abilities and efforts; the promise that each member of society, however humble, be a citizen with the status, function and dignity of a member of society and with a chance of individual fulfillment …
My cousin recently joined a health care startup, only to learn the business model that sold him on the job was still under debate. An in-person meeting was planned to hash it out, so I asked a simple question: Would there be a facilitator? He knew I meant, in this case, someone skilled at guiding …
No, the “Great Resignation” was not just about COVID-19. In fact, four of the biggest reasons people quit jobs last year are always around, and almost entirely within a manager’s control, which means there are solutions within a manager’s control. I’ve read a lot of articles by people claiming to know what caused the Great …
During the pandemic lock-downs, some executives finally learned something scholars have known for a long time: Most people are just as productive at home, if not more so, if the nature of their work allows it. However, a mountain of research shows physically collocated teams outperform similar virtual teams. Put those two points together, and …
In 1999, before I danced away the millennium on New Year’s Eve to Prince while ignoring fears about the Y2K Bug, a major study began changing the way researchers viewed worker motivation. Lead author Edward Deci was the first to propose in 1971 that workers might have internal motivations that had nothing to do with …
A utility meter company I was coaching, part of a large multinational, delayed a customer delivery by a week so it would not book more profits than it had predicted for that quarter. They feared it would hurt their stock prices. Numerous studies have shown that long-term revenues are the primary driver of stock value. …
“The Radical Agilist Blog” reports scientific evidence related to teamwork, leadership, agility, and business governance in a way managers can apply every day. It fights the “Management Knowledge/Practice Gap” between what scholars know about the workplace and what too many managers still do. This blog has roots in an e-mailed newsletter in 2000, TeamResearch News, …
You wanted proof to give your managers about the need to empower your teams, and here it is: Two major studies prove that if workers have “a sense of control in relation to one’s work,” it improves performance by individuals and teams of all types. These are “meta-analyses,” drawing on data from a total of …
Forget Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, and even my own system Full Scale agile™ (FuSca™): If you are a manager pondering how to adopt Agile, your direct-report team can be there in just one meeting. Just as quickly, you will become the kind of servant/transformational leader generations of management gurus have talked about, but few managers actually …
Due to covid-19, my local library was closed for two months. Actually, other urban systems in my state opened much earlier, so part of that period was due to a lack of agility by the library system’s managers. This segues to the title of this post. I took the closure as an opportunity to finally …
Although I already planned on linking my earlier posts on social power to bias in the workplace, events in the streets reinforce the need. I believe the belated global discussion around racism overlooks an underlying factor that must be addressed if we are ever going to gain the moral, social, and financial benefits of truly …
The interest in Dead White Male Philosophers is limited to a tiny slice of the population, I realize. Especially in my home country; as far back as the 1830s, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.” …
Silly me. I thought a silver lining in the Covid Crisis would be that managers would learn most workers do not need constant oversight to do good work, and will be productive from home even with its distractions. Because they couldn’t monitor worker activity closely, some managers would be forced to empower their teams to …
When I walked into the studio of Master Y.K. Kim in 1981, I was lost. Not in the physical sense; I was there on purpose, drawn by his Yellow Pages ad. I was lost in the spiritual sense. My identity was gone. As I looked around his low-rent dojang in Orlando, I spotted on a …
During dinner a while back with an excellent leader in a large company (when eating out was still allowed), I gave him a challenge. We were talking about social power’s unconscious impacts on people. Before stepping away to release some whiskey, I asked him to think about the common behaviors of bad managers he’d had. …
TED talks by managers who try radically weird leadership practices and get amazing results… those are the exceptions that prove the rule, right? If the way most companies are run is a problem, more would change, right? Sorry, but no. The reason companies succeed while using standard practices is because they are competing against companies …
I support workplace diversity not only on ethical grounds, but because it can be a source of competitive advantage. Diversity enhances communication across a broader customer base, expands the pool of qualified job candidates, and provides access to information that would otherwise be unavailable.[1] But data suggests getting those benefits isn’t easy or guaranteed. After …
Rarely has writing a blog post made me downright angry. The problem isn’t that new evidence has convinced me I was wrong about something—that has never bothered me. No, I am angry because new, high-quality evidence proves I have been right for 25 years. The bile comes because very few managers practice what I taught …
In my previous post, I discussed the origins of Kanban to ensure we understood the needs it was designed to fill, and to emphasize some points often ignored by modern implementors. In this post, I will dive directly into the “Scrum versus Kanban” debate by summarizing my search for objective evidence. I looked for any …
One of the ongoing debates in the Agile blogosphere boils up to, “Scrum vs. Kanban.” I have seen endless discourses, based mostly on the proponents’ personal experiences, as to which is the better way to run a project. As an evidence-based manager, I wanted to know if there were any objective data one way or …
Back when “team building” was the hottest fad in management, no activity garnered as much derision as “trust falls.” The self-proclaimed team builder would have the team gather behind one member and ask that person to fall backwards, trusting their peers to catch them. The ridiculous, and much-ridiculed, idea was that somehow not letting another …
Imagine the scene: A large hotel conference room in America filled mostly by white males in dark suits and plain shirts. A coterie of darker-skinned servers works the sea of tables. An older white male emcees the proceedings, and another asks everyone to bow their heads in prayer before delivering a Judeo-Christian blessing. After lunch, …
When you and I hear something we don’t want to believe, here’s what happens in our brains, according to my thesis research on persuasion[1]: The emotional centers of our brain are triggered, and we get an unpleasant physical response such as tightness in the chest. Our brain starts searching for reasons to dismiss the offending …
If you’re reading this on anything bigger than a phone, turn the device over. Depending on where you in the world you got it, you might see a label with one or more sets of letters like CE, UL, or FCC. You might be surprised to learn what goes into getting those letters, and what …
“‘I’m here so that this company doesn’t hire someone like me to come in and destroy your career.'” That’s the ear-catching line a successful litigator of harassment lawsuits uses to get the attention of executives glued to their phones when he is introduced as a speaker. Mark Baute is quoted in an article in The …
Any systematic approach to managing work is better than no system. And any of the existing Agile frameworks are better than a “waterfall” method where Agile is more appropriate, the majority of cases. But you don’t need Crystal or SAFe or even my Full Scale agile™ to be Agile. At the same time Scrum was …
It was a dark moment, that day I realized many Agile advocates do not, in fact, “get it” regarding “self-organizing teams.” One indicator is the term used for people who facilitate Scrum ceremonies. For that reason I had already been thinking about changing the name, and then I started attending diversity and inclusion events. These …
Millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money are funneled into a wide range of startups every year. Any taxpayer might reasonably ask, what do we get for our money? Quite a lot, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF): “Some well-known firms, such as Qualcomm and Symantec, received early support from the NSF program. …
I am a middle-aged, white, Anglo, straight cis-male using he/his/him pronouns. I hope I got that right. I have learned it’s not my place to claim I am an “ally” of minorities, but I am trying to be. Throw in that I was raised upper-middle-class in the American South and own my home debt-free, and …
In one of my best-read posts, I told the tale of Harpo the Ferret’s tail. A tussle over his diagnosis illustrated how experts and nonexperts can learn from evidence. If you didn’t read it, this your spoiler alert. If you did, you can skip the next paragraph. My ferret Harpo developed an odd bulb of …
The British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes wrote a book about the famous Battle of Agincourt from a unique perspective: His ancestors were leaders on both sides in the battle, as they had been in the wars between England and France over four centuries. His great-times-30-grandfather commanded the first army to invade the other side, for …
At a startup competition I attended, I had an experience that reminded me how well-meaning people can end up in conflict because they are trapped in their personal histories. I will share this story despite being embarrassed about it, in hopes you will remember to consider the other person’s possible motives and patterns when a …
It’s easy for top executives to dismiss us “power to the people” consultants. They think us too “soft” to make the hard decisions needed for business success. People need to be directed and controlled, or they’ll just spend their days shopping online and checking social media, right? Leave aside that no one who knows me—a …
Many people are skeptical of science these days. Though my successes over 30 years have been based on scientific learning, I understand why. Scientists make mistakes like everyone else, but the profession makes it easier to admit that, so the public sees the errors. Some cross ethical lines, as in every profession. Most scientists have …
Multiple times a week it happens: No matter how many ways I try to make clear I am only a solo or lead transformation coach, people contact me about joining the team of Agile coaches in some large company. The worst part is not the waste of my time. The worst part is the waste …
I am not the first to point a finger at training as not only a solution to, but a culprit in the Management Knowledge/Practice Gap. That’s the well-documented gulf between techniques proven for decades to create more effective workplaces and the techniques still used by most managers. Researchers of the Gap have noted many problems …
Two seemingly unrelated topics crossed paths while I was researching this post. A common theme in my writings is the questionable nature of statistics bandied about the Internet and presentations. Within the past few months, I heard again the myth that “90% of all communication is nonverbal,” which was thoroughly debunked in the 1980s—by the …
Do you work for an extremely effective organization? No offense, but I doubt it, after writing a paper on the concept. Let’s try a “thought experiment,” though. I will share a high-level summary of the characteristics of an effective organization according to science, footnoted with my sources so you can double-check me. Then I’ll take …
Zappos, the online shoe and fashion retailer, is well known for its unusual organizational culture centered on exceptional customer service and worker freedom. “Our philosophy has been that most of the money we might ordinarily have spent on advertising should be invested in customer service, so that our customers will do the marketing for us …
