In Titanic’s Ballroom
Several so called agile transformations ultimately end with people dancing rock ’n’ roll instead of a slow waltz in Titanic’s ballroom and some beautifully decorated deckchairs. And even if…
The Blog
Gradual fabrication of thoughts while writing.
Man as Perpetually Wanting Animal
Successful collaboration in the age of knowledge work, especially in agile organisations with their high degree of self-organisation and self-responsibility, depends to a large extent on the assumptions about…
Setting Standards in Agile Organizations
Agility requires orientation. It’s exactly this alignment that enables effective autonomy and decentralized decisions, which make agile organizations so adaptable. But agility also requires common standards and conventions…
I have a dream!
The yearning for a new and better form of respectful and thereby profitable cooperation between people is greater than ever. Industrialization and Taylorism have transformed humans into resources. Initially…
If You Say Yes, You Have to Say No
In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is…
Agility Starts with the Assumptions about Human Nature
Agility hinges on the prevailing assumptions about human nature in the organization. Wherever people are generally distrusted and where the belief prevails that people must be motivated to…
Showing Appreciation with the Kudos Cards for the Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership
There’s a lot of whining and complaining. After all, it is very easy to be outraged about the mistakes made by others and especially by “those up there”. However,…
Wu Wei: Act Without Forcing
Only those who can lead themselves can lead others. This is how Father Anselm Grün sums up the essential challenge of self-leadership. Those who want to serve life…
Culture Follows Structure or the Misunderstood Scrum Master
From his decades of experience with the agile transformation of organizations and in particular with the introduction of the LeSS framework developed by Bas Vodde and himself, Craig…
The Workshop on the Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership
The Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership is on the one hand a useful stimulus for personal reflection on one’s own leadership qualities, especially in the form of the recently published…
Equal Dignity as Guiding Principle for Successful Transformations
Transformation is what everyone is talking about, because digitalization demands adaptable and customer-oriented organizations. Apparently steadfast organizational principles and behaviors that have been successful for many years must…
Aberrations of the Agile Transformation
Not everything that has transformation in neon letters on its cover actually is a transformation. It all starts with the erroneous assumption that agility can boost employee performance just…
Good Decisions Between Consensus and Consent
Who decides and how can good decisions be taken? For a long time, this question did not even arise in many hierarchical organizations. In case of doubt, the decision…
Independence in the Sense of the Whole
Digitalization does not replace humans and it cannot do without them. On the contrary, it is precisely because of digitalization that what is typically human is more in…
Lean Leadership: Empowering Instead of Instructing
Much can be learned from Lean Management: Understanding the value for the customer, then identifying the value stream and optimizing the flow to avoid unnecessary effort and last…
Don’t scale agile – descale your organization!
Agile organizations are lean, flexible and adaptable. This is accomplished less by “agilizing” existing structures and processes but rather by consistently questioning these. The solution, of course, is…
Pain of Adaptation in the Corporate World
After my switch from our small but fine start-up esc Solutions to the BMW Group IT in 2015, I was asked more than once whether I really was serious about…
Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership: The Book
A year ago, I published the six theses of the Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership on this blog. The response was overwhelming. Almost 600 people have signed the Manifesto since,…
Learning Serenity from the Stoics
The year is not yet a month old and my resolutions are waste paper. I wanted to handle my time more mindfully, focus better and prioritize more effectively. Like so…
Sailing by Sight
When it comes to agility, many people think in terms of methods such as Scrum on a small scale, frameworks such as LeSS on a large scale or tools such…
Drive Out Fear
The Roman Emperor Caligula became the epitome of the autocratic tyrant with his motto oderint, dum metuant (“let them hate, so long as they fear”). Fortunately, there aren’t…
Management by Objective – Without Carrots and Sticks
The turn of the year is traditionally the time to look back, pause and look forward to the new year. On a personal level, this typically leads to new…
How Do You Feel About Your Time?
Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have more in common than their wealth. Since their first contact in 1991, the two have cultivated an intense friendship in which they…
The Year That Was, 2018 – A Review in Words and Pictures
We live in times in which “many things have changed and change faster and faster”, as the time researcher Karl-Heinz Geißler so aptly put it. 2018 was an…
Leading by Example
Genuine authority is not a question of rank, but of exemplary behavior, for leadership is based more on imitation than on subordination. We could save ourselves a lot of resistance,…
The Trinity of Agile Leadership
No matter what you might think of Scrum, the Scrum Guide beautifully describes three aspects of leadership in the context of agile product development. At the center of…
Dynamics of Effective Teams
Building on the success of the Oxygen project, where Google has been exploring the characteristics of good leadership, in 2012 they launched Project Aristotle, using the same data-driven…
Agile as Concentrated Feed to Increase Employee Performance
There are many good reasons to consider agility. For instance, you could believe in the largely untapped creativity, motivation and self-responsibility of employees. Or you could recognize that…
Three Common Misconceptions About User Stories
User Stories are maybe the best known concept from agile software development. Unfortunately it is also one of the most misunderstood concepts. Let’s clear up the three most…
The Five Principles of Lean Management as the Basis of the Agile Manifesto
In order to understand agility from a historical perspective, it is important to go back to the principles of lean management. Agility in the sense of the Agile Manifesto…
Purpose over Profit
Many companies appear to have forgotten the very purpose of their existence. Most employees therefore answer the question about the purpose of their employer with the apparently correct…
Leadership Under Change – Equality Not Subordination
In the transition from the industrial age to the age of knowledge work, the relationship between employees and their organization changes fundamentally. Dependent workers increasingly become independent knowledge…
Impact over Input
Successful agile organizations are strongly oriented towards a common mission despite the guiding principle of self-organization. Autonomy requires orientation, otherwise it leads to chaos. Of course, all other organizations…
Three Surefire Ways to Kill Any Innovation
There are all sorts of ideas. And those who have visions should consult a physician, as Helmut Schmidt once said. After all, the most important thing is that the…
Agility and Subsidiarity: Autonomous Decisions – Shared Responsibility
Agile organizations rely on the principle of subsidiarity. Decisions are always made as decentralized as possible. The next higher or next larger unit only takes action if the…
Courage – The Underestimated Virtue
For Winston Churchill it was crystal clear that without courage all other virtues would become meaningless. It is not only in society and politics that we need courage…
Modern Court Jesters
Originally, court jesters were not entertainers or jokers, but serious characters. They had an important task and were an integral part of the court. Their foolishness, however, relieved…
Agility and Separation of Powers. Or: What Is the Boss Actually Doing?
In most hierarchical organizations the spirit of absolutism still prevails. All power is with the boss. He or she manages and controls, imposes rules, monitors their compliance and…
10 Insights from Google’s Search for Good Leadership
In 2008, a team at Google launched Project Oxygen. The aim of the project was to find out what defines good leadership and what behaviors characterize a good manager at…
The Scrum Master: Three Popular Anti-Patterns
Scrum is a deceptively simple framework for agile product development. Besides the development team there are only the roles Product Owner and Scrum Master. The process is lean and…
The Prime Directive for Successful Retrospectives
Agility means adaptability. First and foremost with regard to the product being developed. Step by step, usable interim products are created, which help to explore the problem domain…
No More Elephant Carpaccio!
How to eat an elephant? Exactly: In small slices. With this salami tactics you can master big tasks. Many recognize the iterative-incremental nature of agile methods like Scrum…
The Uncomfortable Truth About Open-Plan Offices
While trying to do concentrated work amidst colleagues on the phone or in discussions, I regularly wish to return to the quiet library from my student days. With all…
No Agility Without Trust
Without a culture of trust, no agility. Cargo cult yes, but no agility. And without agility there is no chance of at least surviving digitalization, let alone benefiting from…
A Brief History of Digitalization
Digitalization: Hardly any other buzzword has been used so much in recent years. And as so often with buzzwords, their utilization is inversely proportional to their understanding. Everything…
Jack Welch’s Three Advices on Leadership — Purpose, Generosity and Fun
There is plenty of advice on leadership. However, few are as concise and authentic as those of Jack Welch, General Electric’s long-standing and extraordinarily successful CEO. For him,…
People over Processes
Making decisions is often considered an essential element of leadership. An elite circle of executives makes decisions; at least the big and strategic ones and sometimes, depending on…
Working Sustainably – Less Is More
Sustainability could be defined as a principle according to which no more should be consumed than can be replenished, regenerated or made available again in the future. Usually we…
The Team, the Product and All the Rest
There is a fundamental misunderstanding around agile. This misunderstanding begins with the title of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. For too long, many considered software development to be…
The Customer-Vendor Anti-Pattern
One of the four main propositions of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development is “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”. And then one principle behind the manifesto say: “Our…
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