Inspire, develop, and guide a winning 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.
Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
LLMs and Generative AI in the enterprise.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
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.
New half-day virtual events with live watch parties worldwide!
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Is slowify a real word?
Could right fit help talent discover more meaning and satisfaction at work and help companies find lost productivity?
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.
November 2, 2023
Most authors will likely agree: we probably spend too much time and emotional energy on the book cover. For a lot of books I’ve read, I don’t remember the book cover. And a great book cover will never compensate for a poorly written book.
However, for my favorite books, I can remember the book cover. For instance, when we set up this stage for virtual events in 2021, my wife and boss, Margueritte, organized books by color. Despite how shocking this was to me, I was surprised that when she asked for more, say, red books, I knew exactly which books to find.
I’ve written seven books, including the upcoming Wiring the Winning Organization. Looking back, I think The Phoenix Project was an amazing and iconic book cover. It inspired the cover for The DevOps Handbook and The Unicorn Project.
Going through my notes for all of these previous projects, we decided upon the design for the book cover more than six months before the publication date. Sure, there were many changes, but the major design elements were decided—we mainly were futzing with smaller details.
But for Wiring the Winning Organization, it was July 2023, the book manuscript was already late, the cover needed to be printed in less than three months, and Steve and I still didn’t love any of the book cover concepts.
Somehow our design process had led us to a dead end.
Using the language of our book, we needed an alternative to the longer iteration cycles of working with the designer. In other words, we needed to slowify the problem by going back to low-fidelity prototypes that we could more quickly iterate on. We also needed to simplify the problem so one person could experiment solo, as opposed to requiring higher levels of communication and coordination.
Out of frustration, on the Fourth of July, I opened up a Google Doc and started from scratch, writing down what we knew about what we wanted out of our book cover: We wanted a very simple and clean cover, similar to Dr. Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow and Michael Lewis’ book The Undoing Project.
But the question then became: What object would be suitable to feature on the cover?
I’ve already posted an article about how ChatGPT helped confirm that “slowify” was a good word choice to use in the book, because no other English word captured the notion of “slow down to speed up.”
So maybe ChatGPT could help with book cover ideas.
I gave it the following prompt:
“Please suggest a description of an amazing book cover for a book with the title: “Wiring the Winning Organization: Unleashing Our Collective Greatness through Simplification, Slowification, and Amplification.” The summary of the book follows: …”
After a bit of fumbling around, I asked it to generate a list of 40 objects that would nicely represent the concepts in the book. Here are some of them…
I asked for other objects, asking to focus on themes of connection, architecture, wiring, collaboration, connection, and so forth. But I didn’t love any of the ideas it came up with.
But then I asked it: “Please give twenty pairs of simple notional objects representing great vs. terrible wiring/connection/collaboration. Some of the amazing responses include:
Now we’re getting somewhere!
I had just watched a bunch of videos on using generative AI tools for image generation, such as DALL·E and Midjourney. So maybe these could help generate images of the ideas above. However, I gave up in less than 30 minutes. The problem was that it took too long to generate the images, and I just didn’t have enough experience to get good results.
What was super useful? Google Image Search! It was so quick to be able to create “mood boards” of images that could generate reactions and feedback.
I liked the idea of the light bulbs, so I wanted to create a higher-quality mockup. I used PowerPoint to mock up a cover of a light bulb using my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, tracing over one of my favorite images of a glowing lightbulb.
I posted this in our Slack channel. We all seemed to like the direction this was heading. We discussed this during our next meeting and then gave this to the professional designer. The designer brought their skills in typography, layout, and so forth, to take it to the next level.
The key takeaways:
If you’re a fan of book covers, you may find this of interest. Here are the best book covers according to LitHub for 2021 and 2022.
And here is the entirety of my ChatGPT session from July.
Gene Kim has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was the founder and CTO of Tripwire, Inc., an enterprise security software company, where he served for 13 years. His books have sold over 1 million copies—he is the WSJ bestselling author of Wiring the Winning Organization, The Unicorn Project, and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and the Shingo Publication Award-winning Accelerate. Since 2014, he has been the organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit (now Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit), studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.
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