This post has been adapted from the A Leader’s Guide to Working with Consultants paper by Josh Atwell, Elizabeth Donaldson, John Esser, Ron Forrester, Ben Grinnel, Jason Hobbs, Courtney Kissler, and Jessica Reif. Disruption of change is the balance of business process impact and complexity of change. Often organizations will attempt to take on too much change at once versus starting small, learning, and then scaling. Also, the number of individuals impacted is a factor, but not the primary … [Read more...]
Dependency: Leader’s Guide to Working with Consultants
This post has been adapted from the A Leader’s Guide to Working with Consultants paper by Josh Atwell, Elizabeth Donaldson, John Esser, Ron Forrester, Ben Grinnel, Jason Hobbs, Courtney Kissler, and Jessica Reif. Dependency relates to understanding the business differentiation of the outcomes and also the intent for establishing internal capability. The focus will be on understanding how critical the business outcomes are to your strategy and when you have critical needs. Then, you are going … [Read more...]
Accountability: A Leader’s Guide to Working with Consultants
This post has been adapted from the A Leader’s Guide to Working with Consultants paper by Josh Atwell, Elizabeth Donaldson, John Esser, Ron Forrester, Ben Grinnel, Jason Hobbs, Courtney Kissler, and Jessica Reif. This post of the Leader's Guide to Working with Consultants series focuses on accountability, whether you have established clear ownership of the consulting engagement outcome, and whether you have put in place mechanisms for validating that the desired outcome is achieved. Below are … [Read more...]
A Leader’s Guide to Working with Consultants
This post has been adapted from the A Leader's Guide to Working with Consultants paper by Josh Atwell, Elizabeth Donaldson, John Esser, Ron Forrester, Ben Grinnel, Jason Hobbs, Courtney Kissler, and Jessica Reif. Every year, thousands of executives seek to reinvent their companies through organizational transformation, and every year thousands of executives are disappointed by the results. According to a McKinsey report, just 26% of leaders say the transformation efforts they are familiar with … [Read more...]
Six Papers for DevOps Transformation Leaders
Mythbusting DevOps in the Enterprise Addressing Culture and Leadership Aspects during Transforming The DevOps movement has been primarily driven by practitioners, which is why we’ve ended up with such success at the practice level. As success and awareness have risen, we’ve now seen new challenges and questions around the path to success and applicability for larger organizations. Some have done this very well, others are struggling, and others yet have no idea where to start. This paper focuses … [Read more...]
Playbook to Bust Bureaucracy
So, you’re in an organization, running up against bureaucratic impediments when you try to do what you’re pretty sure is the right thing. Perhaps you’re leading a digital transformation and your company’s bureaucracy is resisting change, fighting to lock in ways of doing things that belong to the days before the Paleolithic era. You’re up against a vast leviathan of a bureaucracy. What should you do? Like many business and technology authors, I’m going to tell you a bunch of stuff based on my … [Read more...]
How to Fix Bureaucracy
This post is an excerpt from Mark Schwartz's The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy. There are three things we must do to eliminate bureaucracy’s Kafkaesque aspects. We must make it lean by removing waste and shrinking lead times. We must make it capable of learning; that is, changing as the environment changes and as better ways are found to accomplish goals. And we must make it enabling—that is, helpful as a way to get things done rather than a no-saying, gatekeeping, troll-controlled … [Read more...]
Technological Maestros: Characteristics of Innovative Leaders
In Episode 17 and Episode 18 of The Idealcast, I was blown away by Dr. Ron Westrum's notion of Technological Maestros, a definition and list of characteristics for a leader that resonates deeply with me. First, let's look at Dr. Westrum's definition of a technological maestro. This is a term that is used in history of technology a lot. First of all, you're dealing with somebody who has very high energy, that's critical. The second thing is they know what questions to ask. The third thing is … [Read more...]
Three Observations on Leading through Writing
AN EXCERPT FROM EPISODE 16 OF THE IDEALCAST WITH GUEST ADMIRAL JOHN RICHARDSON I had mentioned in part one of my interview with Admiral John Richardson, how much I admired the two documents that Admiral Richardson had shared with me. One had the title A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority. And the other was the Navy Leader Development Framework. I loved both documents because they were both so clearly written. And it was such a treat listening to Admiral Richardson and Dr. Steve Spear … [Read more...]
Building a Culture of Leaders from Day One in the US Navy
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...]
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