As an experiment, make yourself read through the next paragraph without responding in your head. Just absorb it. Imagine a working world where line managers have 50 to 70 direct reports, made manageable because the teams are self-directing and include all functions needed to complete the work. Team members handle their own quality control, maintenance, …
Skeptics of Agile—myself among them—are indebted to Dwight (“Ike”) Eisenhower, U.S. president from 1953–61. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military industrial complex,” he said that last year. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”1 From this was coined …
“…we must analyse whether the corporation is satisfying these basic demands: the promise that opportunities be equal and rewards be commensurate to abilities and efforts; the promise that each member of society, however humble, be a citizen with the status, function and dignity of a member of society and with a chance of individual fulfillment …
Due to covid-19, my local library was closed for two months. Actually, other urban systems in my state opened much earlier, so part of that period was due to a lack of agility by the library system’s managers. This segues to the title of this post. I took the closure as an opportunity to finally …
The interest in Dead White Male Philosophers is limited to a tiny slice of the population, I realize. Especially in my home country; as far back as the 1830s, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.” …
TED talks by managers who try radically weird leadership practices and get amazing results… those are the exceptions that prove the rule, right? If the way most companies are run is a problem, more would change, right? Sorry, but no. The reason companies succeed while using standard practices is because they are competing against companies …
Imagine the scene: A large hotel conference room in America filled mostly by white males in dark suits and plain shirts. A coterie of darker-skinned servers works the sea of tables. An older white male emcees the proceedings, and another asks everyone to bow their heads in prayer before delivering a Judeo-Christian blessing. After lunch, …
If you’re reading this on anything bigger than a phone, turn the device over. Depending on where you in the world you got it, you might see a label with one or more sets of letters like CE, UL, or FCC. You might be surprised to learn what goes into getting those letters, and what …
Millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money are funneled into a wide range of startups every year. Any taxpayer might reasonably ask, what do we get for our money? Quite a lot, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF): “Some well-known firms, such as Qualcomm and Symantec, received early support from the NSF program. …
I am a middle-aged, white, Anglo, straight cis-male using he/his/him pronouns. I hope I got that right. I have learned it’s not my place to claim I am an “ally” of minorities, but I am trying to be. Throw in that I was raised upper-middle-class in the American South and own my home debt-free, and …
In 1980 when Ricardo Semler took over SEMCO, a manufacturing plant with 100 workers and $4 million in annual earnings, it was nearly bankrupt. By 1989 he had introduced many radical changes, and his outline of those and the results were published in Harvard Business Review (HBR). When Semler first took over, he tried to …
As you read this, give thanks to Nikola Tesla. An extraordinary genius whose career spanned the turn of the previous century, his inventions are the basis for the systems powering your device and transmitting this post wirelessly. He had so critical a role in the technology undergirding our life today, the author of a 2018 …
Nathan Harvey, a Cloud Developer Advocate at Google, is at the forefront of the DevOps movement. What is DevOps, you ask? AH-HAH!! Exactly. That is part of the reason I went to hear him speak, because the definitions I had been hearing did not make sense to me. They all just sounded like what Agile …
