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 …
Tag: history
The Book that Tempts Me to Quit Coaching
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, …
Unlikely Agile Leader Provided Lessons, and a Warning
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 …
A Response to Major Change with a Major Twist
“…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 …
Tolstoy on War and Peace and Agile
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 …
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 …