Category: change
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My Book – Building the Agile Business
I said a good while back that I intended to write a book, so what's happened since then? Well, after lots of to-ing and fro-ing with various publishers, we found one who really shared the vision for what we wanted to do. And so I'm delighted to announce that we have a publishing deal with the lovely…
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Two More Things About S-Curves
I wrote recently about S-curves (or Sigmoid Curves) as a way of understanding the lifecycle of a technology, and the trajectory of many successful systems. Charles Handy (in The Empty Raincoat) used S-curves as a way to demonstrate the need for significant and regular reinvention and change, and also why disruption often happens just when an existing…
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Gall’s Law
'Gall's Law' comes from John Gall's 1975 book Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail. Gall's work has inspired a number of authors in systems thinking but the book actually focuses more on what we can learn from system engineering failures and how not to design systems. The law (although it was never…
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Agile Strategy Mapping
One of the key challenges in any change programme or strategy implementation is connecting an overarching organisational strategy with the departmental strategies and tactics needed to make it happen and all head in the same direction. And then there is the oft forgotten required conditions, environment and culture that not only supports but enables the…
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Redefining Leadership in the Digital Age
When I did the research late last year for the Econsultancy report on Effective Leadership in the Digital Age, one of the (many) interesting things to come out of it was the emphasis placed by the interviewees on the value of softer skills. Nobody that I spoke to (and I spoke to a lot of…
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Strategy and Tactic Trees
Apart from companies that express or communicate their strategy poorly, or those that conflate a varied set of goals or targets with a coherent strategy (as Richard Rumelt said in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: ‘Goals are not strategy. Goals are wishes. Strategies are how one goes about achieving goals.’), one of the most common strategy…
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The Agile Team Onion
I really liked Emily Webber's thoughts about Agile team onions. I've talked a lot over the past few years about the power of small multi-disciplinary teams to drive big change, and retain agility as you scale – and concepts like Amazon's two-pizza teams. Although as this piece adeptly describes, the point of two pizza teams…
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Drink Before You’re Thirsty, Eat Before You’re Hungry
One of my (experienced) cycling friends once told me that on longer rides it was really important to be drinking or eating well before you get thirsty or hungry in order to keep yourself well-hydrated and you’re energy levels high. It was good advice, and something I was reminded of reading Ben Evans’ post on…
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‘Dark MarTech’
I liked the phrase 'dark martech' (not least because, like 'dark social' it is suggestive of things that are in reality quite notable but less talked about) that Seth Ulinkski, an analyst at tech research business TBR, uses over on Scott Brinker's blog to describe the mass of home-grown marketing technology that companies build themselves internally.…
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Building the Culture to Move Fast
I think it's very easy when we're trying to move fast as a business to over-focus on the process and under-focus on the environment that enables speed to happen. And here I'm really talking about the culture in which a team is operating. If it's culture that is characterised by trust, which enables a greater…