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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
