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, …
Tag: structure
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 …
Stop Calling These Practices “Radical!”
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 …
Extreme Effectiveness: Does Your Firm Match the Model?
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 …
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 …
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 …