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 …
Author: Jim Morgan
How a Culture Change Guru Blew a Culture Change
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 …
Harpo the Ferret on Experts vs. Evidence
We had a health scare in the Morgan household recently. During an annual checkup, Harpo was found to have an enlarged lymph node in his torso. Harpo is a ferret, named like his brothers for members of the Marx Brothers comedy team of the 1930s, because ferrets are the funniest animals I’ve lived with. In …
To Succeed, He Threw Out the Management Books
In 1980 when Ricardo Semler took over SEMCO, a manufacturing plant with 100 workers and $4 million in annual earnings, it was nearly bankrupt. By 1989 he had introduced many radical changes, and his outline of those and the results were published in Harvard Business Review (HBR). When Semler first took over, he tried to …
Bad Teams Talk Too Much… and Too Little
Presenters often extol the value of more communication. At the same time we hear complaints about “information overload” and “too many meetings.” I am among those who have advised managers to err on the side of overcommunicating, and in The Truth about Teambuilding I cover evidence that talking more improves team decision-making. However, I added …
Should Startups Take Time to Get Organized? Here’s the Evidence
When I was working as a group manager at a mid-sized startup near Seattle years ago, a fellow manager said it was the fifth startup he had worked in. Of the other four, only one survived. That one had stopped work for two months to get its processes in order. Our current startup was a …
Agile Truths from an “Agile” Project before Agile
I trained four administrative teams to meet the principles of the Agile Manifesto seven years before it was written. Their story busts several myths about Agile that continue to hinder its adoption 25 years later. As mentioned in a recent post, Los Alamos National Laboratory faced a major risk in 1994. Their equipment management system …
Agilists Still Face Tesla’s Enemies
As you read this, give thanks to Nikola Tesla. An extraordinary genius whose career spanned the turn of the previous century, his inventions are the basis for the systems powering your device and transmitting this post wirelessly. He had so critical a role in the technology undergirding our life today, the author of a 2018 …
Half-a-Dozen Proven Ways to Innovate
For those of you trying to decide right now the best way to get creative about your products, processes, or problems, a new report is worth a look. Nesta, “The Innovation Foundation” in the United Kingdom, recently released A Compendium of Innovation Methods. It was written by 24 contributors including researchers, leaders of innovation organizations, …
Don’t Call the Job “Agile Project Manager”
A Self-Contradicting Job Title Though a free-lancer these days, I keep a few job alerts running just in case something fitting my exacting requirements pops up. Plus, it is a way to monitor what is happening in the real world of Agile versus the theoretical one of blogs and books. One of the biggest indicators …
Find Good Management Evidence on Your Own
Free Sources of Management Studies Those who have read my earlier posts on evidence-based management have learned about “The Management Knowledge/Practice Gap”; discovered one reason for it is that “Good Evidence is Hard to Find”; and become skeptical readers about science because “Studies Say, Question Articles about Studies.” Now comes your chance to close the …
Please Don’t Feed the Seagulls
Nearly every week, I am contacted by a recruiter wanting me to become a consultant who guides clients in Agile transformation on a traveling basis. It feels like every major IT consulting/staffing agency is getting into the game. Too bad the only evidence this approach works comes from drop-in consultants and their agencies. A look …
Studies Say, Question Articles about Studies
Start with the Source In previous posts I talked about attempts to close the management knowledge-practice gap through evidence-based management (EBM), and the problems with the information sources most managers use. Science is only one source in EBM, but it is the least understood, so in this post I will give you the tools to …
Cheap Agile:
You Don’t Need Full-Time Scrum Masters
A team with a full-time organizer is not “self-organizing!” My path from technical writer to Agile Coach started at Los Alamos National Laboratory 25 years ago. A new project was framed as a rewrite of a manual. But it became clear this required getting four groups on the same page—pun intended—within and across groups, and …
Good Evidence is Hard to Find
A Short History of Scientific Evidence for Managers In my first post on evidence-based management, I explored the gap between what researchers know managers should do to improve organizational performance, and what managers do. Before telling you how to close that gap for yourself, in this post I want to make clear you aren’t responsible …
Melt Down the Iron Triangle
Success rates for projects as judged by the “Triple Constraint” of scope/quality, budget, and cost, are miserably low. Less than half of any type of project succeeds on just two of those metrics, according to decades of surveys including the most recent from the Project Management Institute (PMI).[1] So many of the factors in success …
The Management Knowledge/Practice Gap
Dangers when Doctors Ignore Science In the 1980s, researchers began raising alarms about the lack of current scientific knowledge among practitioners in a business clearly based on science: medicine. Although hundreds of medical studies were published every year to update our understanding of the human body, only a small percentage of doctors were consulting that …
Seeing Past “Willful Blindness”
I often tell the story of a project manager at Microsoft who wasn’t very good at it. Among other reasons, he didn’t use project management software to control the work, despite Microsoft Project being the industry leader. Once he and my office-mate drove separately to an offsite meeting. She got there first despite having left …
DevOps was Born of Bad Agile
Nathan Harvey, a Cloud Developer Advocate at Google, is at the forefront of the DevOps movement. What is DevOps, you ask? AH-HAH!! Exactly. That is part of the reason I went to hear him speak, because the definitions I had been hearing did not make sense to me. They all just sounded like what Agile …