Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

I have the highest regard for Apple CEO Steve Jobs. He is, without doubt, the greatest "industrial designer" of the computer age. No one in the last 30 years has had anywhere near the kind of vision for "personal computers" that Jobs has had. Indeed, the ability to bring that vision off in such a dramatic fashion has been the hallmark of Jobs's entire career.

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: