This quarter’s NYSE Corporate Board Member Magazine has a cover article entitled, “The Importance of Being AGILE” (read here). The headlines are: “The current wave of uncertainty, combined with the breakneck speed of technological change, means public company boards must be nimble and able to retool strategy more quickly than ever before.” My Translation: Indeed, we live in an accelerating world ... Read More »
This month’s Harvard Business Review captures the agility challenge for CEOs, Executives and their teams these days – What Great CEOs Do Differently (May-June 2017), resulting from a 10 year study called the CEO Genome Project, identifying the specific attributes that differentiate high-performing CEOs. Our most important discovery was that successful chief executives tend to demonstrate four specific behaviors that ... Read More »
Great to be working again with my good friend Marvin Dejean who is an emerging thought-leader on design thinking, which goes hand in hand with agile-thinking: The Focused, Fast & Flexible Manifesto. In particular, we are working together with more and more Boards to help them be an AGILE Board. Read More »
Lincoln City Football Club Coach Danny Cowley revealed that his team plan was to use a unique approach to Saturday’s FA Cup match against Arsenal by breaking the match into 9 different ten-minute games. 9 Sprints! That’s Agile! He needed a different approach as Lincoln City Football Club is the first non-league club to make it to the FA Cup Quarter Final in 103 ... Read More »
Great article about using Scrum/Agile in Saab for their JAS39 Gripen Fighter Plane (on which we provided the Auxillary Gearbox when I was a Sales & Marketing VP for Dowty Aerospace in the UK), especially for the latest variant, the JAS39E multi-role strike fighter. Downlaoid PDF here: Owning the Sky with Agile The article cites the following benefits: Advanced military ... Read More »
Here is a great downloadable PDF of an MSc Thesis studying “Scrum in Mechanical Product Development” which does a nice job outlining Agile/Scrum and bridging its application to mechanical product development, in its conclusion citing the following benefits: This study shows that using the Scrum framework for mechanical development teams can provide the following benefits: Increased co-operation and co-ordination. Increased ... Read More »
Updated March 2017. Most people assume that AGILE methodologies started with the software industry, the creation of The Agile Manifesto by a meeting of software gurus in 2001 and evolution of “Agile Software Development” thereafter (read more: Waterfall vs Agile/Sprints/Scrum – Pivoting to the future of Agile-Teamwork), using that as support for their argument that AGILE doesn’t apply to hardware companies. They would be ... Read More »
“Here’s to those who have always seen things differently”. Mental-Agility is essential to Enterprise-Agility. A great video from Apple used internally to promote creative thinking and perspective shifting/pivoting to “unbox” and see things from a different angle. Great to play with you team at the start of a creative thinking/innovation journey. Things are not-always/always-not what they seem! Read More »
One of my new best friends – Ryan Walter – 1986 Stanley Cup winning Hockey player with the Montreal Candiens (that’s the winners ring on my pinky) and a cameo superstar in the movie “Miracle” – he played the referee after being engaged as a consultant to select the team of players to act in the movie and be Kurt Russel’s ... Read More »
“Decisions, decisions, decisions, CEOs are in the business of decision making” amplified Sam Reese, CEO of Vistage, at our annual chair conference earlier this week. Yes, indeed, I couldn’t agree more, we can distill a business down to a transaction-flow of decisions (read more) and our research reveals that decision-making is the weakest scoring of the 15 agile capabilities. In most ... Read More »
Michael Richardson Cracking the Agility Code