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Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
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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.
Weekly discussion around “Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge” with author John Willis.
VIRTUAL — Helping leaders succeed and organizations thrive (formerly DevOps Enterprise Summit).
Venue: Fontainebleau — Helping leaders succeed and organizations thrive (formerly DevOps Enterprise Summit).
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.
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.
The application of just the right amount of force in just the right place to throw a four-hundred–pound wrestler to the ground. The slow wearing away at a fault line between two geological plates that suddenly results in a vigorous shaking of the earth. The one or two harpoons that tire out a sixty-foot, forty-ton whale so that it can be killed by a precisely directed lance thrust. These are the ways of the Sumo Wrestler.
Sumo is a traditional Japanese martial art that really does resemble an earthquake. Two inconceivably massive tectonic plates in loincloths and strange hair-knobs push up against each other, the tension building until it is suddenly released and one of the wrestlers shakes the stadium by falling to the ground. (Actually, a wrestler can win either by pushing his opponent out of the ring or by making his opponent hit the ground with anything but his feet.) Here’s the subtlety: if you push too hard, your opponent might simply yield, and you’ll go flying. If you don’t push hard enough, then your opponent will push you and you’ll go flying.
A sumo match can be a delicate balancing of forces, where each wrestler is trying to find exactly the right moment to apply exactly the right amount of force to exactly the right place to get the opponent off balance. Our ally the Sumo Wrestler meets bureaucracy head-on and pushes with the just the right strength at just the right point to win the match.
A bureaucracy is a huge immovable object—a leviathan, a tectonic plate, a fourhundred- pound guy in a loincloth. The Sumo Wrestler uses bureaucracy’s force against it; he finds a small leverage point and applies force right there. Where does the bureaucracy have weaknesses?
Next, we’ll look at the plays of The Black Belt Bureaucrat…
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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