Category: Agile
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Why culture is at the heart of Boeing’s problems
‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’, or so the saying (from Peter Drucker) goes. Boeing’s long list of recent problems have been well documented. And there’s been a number of good analyses of the real causes behind them, amongst which this Harvard piece is probably the best. What has struck me as I’ve read more about…
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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, scientists and programmers who were tasked with inventing the computing technologies of the…
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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 instructors to understand how they could best integrate new technology and tools into…
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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 trapped in 12 levels of hierarchy which serves to put distance between leaders…
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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 to experiment, but for them to test and learn within ‘safe to fail’…
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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 the way for the modern electric light bulb including Alessandro Volta, Humphrey Davy,…
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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 Carter, the founder of a car racing team. The team is coming up…
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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 end. One of them is what cockpit crews would call ‘techniques and procedures’…
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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 risk with this approach of-course is that it becomes overly reductive and misses…
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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 useful in the research phase of the project were these questions for leaders…