You need a senior person at a meeting. The meeting is supposed to start at 2 pm. The leader strolls in at 2:15. When leaders act this way, they show their power. When I’ve asked why the person is late, they often say, “I had another meeting that ran long.” While that’s what occurred, people […]
When Mark Kilby and I wrote From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, we discussed the fact that we no longer needed physical face-to-face interactions. Instead, we needed high-fidelity virtual interactions. (High-fidelity virtual interactions didn’t exist when the guys got together at Snowbird to write the Agile Manifesto for Software Development.) The Allen Curve explains
I’ve been hearing people talk about “hybrid” remote teams. So far, every person I’ve talked to means something different. When Mark Kilby and I wrote From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, we differentiated between these types of teams: Collocated, as all the people are within 8-16 m of each other. (See the Allen Curve
You’re a leader in the organization. And you’re supposed to be at another meeting, that started 15 minutes ago. Your previous meeting ran long, so now you’re late. But the conversation you just had? That conversation prevented a bad product decision. (Or, it prevented a customer meltdown. Or something equally important.) At least, the decisions
Do you ever encounter perfection rules when you write (or create in any way)? Maybe you’ve heard these statements—or you’ve said them to yourself: We must spend a lot of time “polishing” to create perfect writing. We must not publish until the work is perfect. We can create a perfect piece and it’s worth our
More of my clients say they want business agility. (That’s a good thing.) Yet, we don’t share a common definition of business agility. My clients mostly discuss their mindset. Mindset might help people, but it’s not sufficient. Instead, let’s consider how to see management’s adaptable and resilient actions. Those actions show that managers change their
Most of us writers start with bad advice, to write “formally.” We’re not supposed to talk to the reader. Or, we’re supposed to avoid stories. Worse, we’re supposed to use passive voice. That leads us to write like this: <A person> will be missed. Your work is appreciated. This work needs to be undertaken. Here’s
I spoke with Andy Kaufman on his People and Projects Podcast 377. Full disclosure: I met Andy back in 1999 at the Software Development conference. So we’ve known each other for a long time. I subscribe to his podcast because I like the way he interviews guests. He looks beyond the obvious to deeper insights.
When I sent my newsletter last month, Modern Management: Want Valuable Outcomes? Create Overarching Goals, several readers asked me questions. Why did I differentiate between outputs, outcomes, and benefits? I decided that was worth a blog post. Here’s how I define and use the terms. Outputs By themselves, a customer can’t use an output. We
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