All organizations use cost accounting to report on their revenue, including profit and loss. We are so accustomed to using cost accounting that we don’t realize how it hides the truth about our progress. Worse, cost accounting creates and reinforces a culture of resource efficiency thinking. (In resource efficiency, the person is the unit of […]
Maybe you’ve had this conversation with a manager: You want to do something that costs some money. Maybe go to a conference, bring in some training, or something a little out of the ordinary. The manager says, “No, that costs too much.” Or, as a consultant, a manager says, “Your proposal is too much for
I’ve been thinking and experimenting a lot about how to use the various LLMs, both in my work and with my clients. I keep seeing a familiar trap: that managers think the gating factor in product development is the speed of coding. But that’s not true. The gating factor is the speed of understanding the
Many of my management clients tell me, “time is money.” That is only partially correct. Once you decide to invest a dollar, that dollar has the same value as any other dollar. Instead of focusing on the expense of a dollar, look for the value that dollar can return. (Because no one ever knows how
Several of my clients claim they have plans. But I don’t see the elements of a plan in what they do. Instead, I see wishes that the future will unfold in a particular way. I also have wishes. But the more we confuse them with plans, the less likely we will get the future we
By now, you’ve probably seen the Wall Street Journal article on happy hour, or seen the various news coverage stories mourning the loss of drinking after work. What caught my eye was a video of a man asking, “Why should I work longer for free?” He has a point. He should not work longer for
The various AI vendors want us to trust their autonomous agents. I have several problems I would love to use AI to solve. (Including updating all the tags on this site!) However, I cannot trust the agents yet. Even when I use interactive prompting, I’m not happy with the results. Those results can change (non-deterministic
I have options for all kinds of work I want to do today: The creative work, which includes a wide variety of writing (articles, blog posts, and yes, more books) and more workshops Paperwork. Yes, I have accounting and all kinds of spreadsheet reconciliation. Client preparation work for when they return from their summer vacations.
I’ve heard that the AA/PMI wants to create a manifesto for enterprise agility. I’m not sure we need a manifesto, but that’s fine. Here are the necessary conditions for enterprise agility: A culture of flow efficiency thinking. That means everyone collaborates across the organization to optimize up for one overarching goal. Limited planning horizons, with
Does your organization use a PMO as a way to manage the various P functions: project, program, and portfolio management? Plenty of organizations do use PMOs. However, I rarely see them as effective in furthering the organization’s operational excellence or the strategy. Instead, I too often see them as yet another function that creates delays