Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders
Leadership and teaming skills are front and center in times of rapid change. Meet today’s constant disruption head on with expert guidance in leadership, business strategy, transformation, and innovation. Whether the disruption du jour is a digitally-driven upending of traditional business models, the pandemic-driven end to business as usual, or the change-driven challenge of staffing that meets your transformation plans — you’ll be prepared with cutting edge techniques and expert knowledge that enable strategic leadership.
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Insight
Many managers use the mantra, "do more with less." At the recent Agile 2010 conference, Pat Reed from GAP, who copresented with me, shortened this mantra to "do less." The theme of our presentation was value optimization or, as Pat likes to say, "value imagineering" -- determining the highest-valued chunks of functionality to implement next, whether those chunks are project
Outsourcing firms tend to market themselves as partners in innovation, and firms consider adopting an outsourcing strategy as a way to attain competitive edge. While outsourcing is a promising approach, it can also be a risky endeavor, as it may deter the firm's inherent ability to bring innovative products to market.
If you want to be a leader, how successful you are will depend greatly on the culture where you work. "But wait," you might say. "Doesn't it matter more that you have the ability to lead? That you have the traits that make a leader?" Perhaps, but if the culture you work in doesn't allow you to practice those traits -- or worse still, discourages those traits -- they become irrelevant.
An ever-increasing number of firms, both large and small, must deal with the challenges created by a distributed, virtualized workforce. This situation emerges for many reasons, such as the globalization of the firm's activities and points of presence, a mobilized sales force, the need to outsource various corporate functions, and the need for noncolocated teams to collaborate.
Building trust lies at the heart of success with agile approaches to software development. The agile philosophy depends on people rather than process to maintain order and quality. We lighten up the development process and dispense with many of the artifacts traditionally used to orchestrate project activities. We bridge the gap with increased collaboration and teamwork.
You may think it obvious to the point of being trite to say that change is "not an option" or "the only constant is change" [1]. Yet, with churn in the global economy catching businesses off guard, and a slurry of such books as Subject to Change, Change by Design, and A Sense of Urgency [2], there's also a sense that change is not only imperative but something we need to become good at. We need to be not only reactive, adapting to a changing world, but proactive -- changing the world, before it changes us. Why?
Lately, I’ve been curling up at night with a fascinating read. The 2009 Shift Index is from Deloitte’s Center for the Edge and written by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Land Davison.
In client consulting engagements, I frequently find that the root cause of a lot of frustration among managers, team members, and executives stems from the inability (or unwillingness) to choose what's most important. I had the interesting experience of trying to build a value-based priorities model with a client, and had the following exchange: