LLMs and Generative AI in the enterprise.
Inspire, develop, and guide a winning organization.
Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
Create visible workflows to achieve well-architected software.
Understand and use meaningful data to measure success.
Integrate and automate quality, security, and compliance into daily work.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
Learn how to enhance collaboration and performance in large-scale organizations through Flow Engineering
Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
Clarify team interactions for fast flow using simple sense-making approaches and tools.
Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years.
Exploring the impact of GenAI in our organizations & creating business impact through technology leadership.
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Just as physical jerk throws our bodies off balance, technological jerk throws our mental models and established workflows into disarray when software changes too abruptly or without proper preparation.
Leaders can help their organizations move from the danger zone to the winning zone by changing how they wire their organization’s social circuitry.
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
August 3, 2021
Note: This post is an abridged adaptation from Mark Schwartz’s The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy. Get the book to get the full playbook.
There are times when bureaucracy is the best available solution. You reach into your tool bag as a leader and what comes out is a sticky, gooey gob of rules that you have to enforce, maybe to ensure your company stays compliant with GDPR or your expense and HR policies are applied fairly. Or, if you’re an IT leader, perhaps you need to brew up some rules around security, enterprise architecture standards, or shared services with chargebacks to business units.
What’s the recipe for a bureaucracy that doesn’t stir up metaphysical pathos among those subject to it? How can you use a bureaucracy the way Weber intended—to promote efficiency, fairness, and merit-based organization? To make it “domination through knowledge” rather than through petty authority and arbitrariness? How do you make sure it doesn’t pettifog?
Of course: you need to make it lean, learning, and enabling.
To learn more about how to apply the ways of the Monkey, Razor, and Sumo Wrestler, pick up Mark Schwartz’s The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy.
Mark Schwartz is an iconoclastic CIO and a playful crafter of ideas, an inveterate purveyor of lucubratory prose. He has been an IT leader in organizations small and large, public, private, and nonprofit. As an Enterprise Strategist for Amazon Web Services, he uses his CIO experience to bring strategies to enterprises or enterprises to strategies, and bring both to the cloud. As the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices. He is pretty sure that when he was the CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange he was the first person ever to use business intelligence and supply chain analytics to place au pairs with the right host families. Mark speaks frequently on innovation, bureaucratic implications of DevOps, and using Agile processes in low-trust environments. With a BS in computer science from Yale, a master’s in philosophy from Yale, and an MBA from Wharton, Mark is either an expert on the business value of IT or else he just thinks about it a lot.
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