Category: Agile
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On Xerox PARC, and the failure of execution
“Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry, could have been the IBM of the nineties, could have been the Microsoft of the nineties.” Steve Jobs When Xerox opened their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970 it brought together talented computer engineers,
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Using SAMR to navigate technological change
One of my favourite frameworks for helping to understand and navigate technological change is the acronym SAMR, which stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. SAMR originates from the education sector, and was created by Dr. Ruben Puentedura as a way for
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Moving on from corporate bureaucracy
This was an interesting take from the CEO of Bayer talking about how their company had become strangled by bureaucracy (thanks to Tim Harrap for the prompt). He writes that Bayer’s internal rules for employees fill 1,392 pages, and that employees are
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Traffic lights and roundabouts
There was a lovely analogy that Alison Orsi used in the latest Google Firestarters episode (podcast links here) in which she talks about the secrets of effective marketing transformation. The analogy relates to how important it is for leaders to empower teams
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Who really invented the light bulb? On collaborative innovation, and the stories we tell
Ask anyone who invented the light bulb and most people would probably say Thomas Edison. And yet, whilst Edison patented the first commercially successful bulb in 1879, the invention was (like many innovations) a cumulative and widely collaborative affair. Several innovators paved
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NASA, the Space Shuttle Challenger and Decision-making
There’s a renowned fictional case study (originated by Jack Brittain and Sim Sitkin) which is used in business schools to help students understand the risks around poorly informed decision-making. The scenario that students are given is to imagine that they are John
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Techniques and procedures
This episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast starts with an interesting question (why do airline pilots typically speak in the same way and all sound the same when addressing the passengers?) but then brings in some tangentially interesting concepts towards the
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Strategy on a page
I once worked with a client to create a one page summary of their transformation strategy. We had a name for the strategy, a defined mission and a vision, some associated values, a customer promise, key goals, time gates and measures. The
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Questions for leaders
Over the last year I’ve been doing a lot of work with leaders in the NHS helping them to navigate change and understand to get the most out of technology in support of improvement. One of the resources that I found really
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Missionaries, not Mercenaries
In the comments to my post on tipping points in social convention and change Mark Earls made a couple of great points. He built on the central theme of the post about how (rather than treating transformation as a marketing exercise) leaders