This post is an excerpt of Mark Schwartz's The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. IT Bureaucracy: Not Fooling Anyone Among the biggest, baddest, bullyingest bureaucrats in a large enterprise are the IT folks. Yes, us, the very IT folks who so hate bureaucracy when we find it imposed on us. Your password, we say, must be in a format that guarantees you’ll never remember it, and you must change it every few … [Read more...]
Accountability: Leaders are Accountable Too
This is a transcript of episode 126 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. Coming to the final chapter of Agile Conversations, we look at how leaders can not only provide accountability for others, but be accountable themselves, including stories from the early days of agile and from today’s clients. So this is our last in the series of podcasts about the book. We’re up to the final chapter of the book. As always in the series, we’re not going to recap … [Read more...]
Why: Finding the Balance for Joint Design
This post was adapted from episode 124 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. As we get to chapter 4 in our tour through Agile Conversations, it’s time to talk about joint design. In this post we focus on a common error that we didn’t cover in depth in the book: how trying to “convince” someone through advocacy fails. Using the Four Rs, we role play an ineffective advocacy-heavy conversation about tech team execution, and then revise it to … [Read more...]
The Battle of Borodino: Business as a Complex Adaptive System
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. In War and Peace, Tolstoy writes of the battle of Borodino, in which Napoleon (sort of) defeats Russia and wins the opportunity to watch Moscow burn, though not much more. The day before the battle, he walks the battlefield and gives his commanders orders for the disposition of the troops—orders which are, for the most part, ignored. During the battle, he stands in … [Read more...]
Q&A with Mark Schwartz and Gene Kim
Recently, Gene Kim had a chance to speak with Mark Schwartz about Mark's new book, War and Peace and IT, Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age: Gene Kim: What inspired you to write a book about IT management for business leaders? Mark Schwartz: I meet with executives from over a hundred large enterprises each year. It’s amazing how patterns emerge: so many of them are trying to transform digitally, trying to find new sources of growth and to survive disruption—and … [Read more...]
Recapping the #DOES18 CrowdChat – Tapping into Transformations
We recently teamed up with several members of the DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018 (DOES18) community to host a #DOES18 CrowdChat. This CrowdChat gave members of the DevOps transformation community a chance to interact and connect with leading experts and practitioners before the event this June. During the hour-long social conversation, we posed several topics - from top learning resources to favorite DevOps meme - for the DOES18 community to illuminate the latest trends in DevOps, … [Read more...]
Q&A With Dominica DeGrandis and Gene Kim
Recently, Gene Kim and Dominica DeGrandis had a chance to discuss Dominica's new book, Making Work Visible. Gene Kim: What inspired you to write this book? Dominica DeGrandis: When I was a Kanban for DevOps flow consultant, I facilitated a lot of workshops to help organizations design and improve their workflow. Workshop attendees repeatedly requested a handout that they could reference during the workshops. They wanted to look at the example kanban boards and policies while doing the … [Read more...]
Q&A With Mark Schwartz and Gene Kim
Recently, Gene Kim and Mark Schwartz had a chance to discuss Mark's upcoming book, A Seat at the Table. It was an enlightening discussion about inspiration, common misconceptions and the often bumpy journey of a CIO. Gene Kim: Share the story of what inspired you to write A Seat at the Table, as well as the first time you realized that a) you didn’t have one, and b) when you finally got one? Mark Schwartz: I remember a conversation I had with the CEO of a company where I was CIO. My IT … [Read more...]
