AN EXCERPT FROM EPISODE 16 OF THE IDEALCAST WITH GUEST ADMIRAL JOHN RICHARDSON Gene Kim: One of the things that really leapt out at me is your emphasis around leadership development. You had once told Steve Spear and me a story about the extent that you went to, to reinvigorate training, to toughen up the training. You had this incredible story about how that training came about. Getting away from the post 1940 human conveyor belt mentality and the amazing outcome that resulted from it. Could … [Read more...]
Learning Culture vs. Compliance Culture
An Excerpt from Episode 15 of The Idealcast with Guest Admiral John Richardson Gene Kim: I think we've all witnessed situations where an organization that once exhibited dynamic learning characteristics, well, they start to calcify. When I attended Dr. Steve Spear's workshop at MIT in 2014, I loved the way he cast the US space program in the 1960s as one of fundamental dynamic learning. I recently read Gene Kranz' book, Failure Is Not an Option. And I love the way he described his role in it, a … [Read more...]
Culture and Leadership: The Seven Domains of Transformation
This is part of our Seven Domains of Transformation series, which has been adapted from the Project to Product Transformation white paper by Ross Clanton, Amy Walters, Jason Zubrick, Pat Birkeland, Mik Kersten, Alan Nance, and Anders Wallgren. You can download and read the white paper in its entirety here. Why Is Culture and Leadership Important? A product-centric operating model requires high levels of empowerment, collaboration, and experimentation. As Peter … [Read more...]
Workforce and Talent: The Seven Domains of Transformation
Why Is Workforce and Culture Important? Traditionally, organizations have been based on hierarchies with decisions made at the top, with detailed direction flowing downward through multiple management layers to the teams. Traditional enterprise structures organized employees by functional specialty departments, each with their own work intake mechanisms, procedures, and goals. Work was heavily governed by a traditional Project Management Office (PMO) focused on prioritizing the work for … [Read more...]
Lack of Psychological Safety at Boeing
This post is an excerpt from the book Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility by Jonathan Smart, with Myles Ogilvie, Zsolt Berend, and Simon Rohrer. 787 Dreamliner Factory, North Charleston, South Carolina Cynthia Kitchens was a quality manager at the Boeing North Charleston factory, which makes the 787 Dreamliner. According to an investigation by the New York Times in 2019, Kitchens said that her superiors penalized her in performance reviews and berated her on … [Read more...]
Optimize Your Time with The Balanced Calendar
What prevents you from getting work done? One of the top answers is too many meetings! Too many interruptions, meetings, and tools overburdens workers and can lead to burn out. In this post, we visit Dominica DeGrandis's advice for creating a balanced calendar to optimize your time. Too Many Meetings A calendar full of meetings leads to little time to complete actual work. We double book, triple book, and even quadruple book our time. Dominica DeGrandis describes three common types of … [Read more...]
Working From Home During a Pandemic: A Tale of Two Cities
“We're doing very well. We're barely hanging in there. Some people are loving work from home. Some people are hating work from home. So who's right? Who's wrong? How do we make sense of it? And what's the data tell us, because remember, we aren't just working from home, we're working from home through a pandemic, and at least in the US, a handful of other crises. So while there isn't a perfect examination of life and working from home, we do have some interesting data points. We can look out … [Read more...]
Benefits of a DevOps Mindset
A series of advice blogs from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 presenters. Sometimes, it's not easy to help a boss or colleague understand why and how DevOps can solve many or your problems. But these experts from the DevOps Enterprise Summit boil it down to its simplest and most powerful for you. “We are designing an entire system of delivery, from idea to end user, around the truth that every requirement is wrong, we've misunderstood it, and/or it will have changed by the time we can deliver a … [Read more...]
Conway’s Law: Critical for Efficient Team Design in Tech
This post on Conway's Law is adapted from Chapter 2 of Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. Conway's Law Conway’s law is critical to understanding the forces at play when organizing teams amidst the long-lasting, unattended impact they can have on our software systems, as the latter have become larger and more interconnected than ever before. But you might wonder if a law from 1968 about software architecture has stood the test of time. We’ve come a long … [Read more...]
