Latest Posts

Wu Wei: Act Without Forcing

Published by Marcus Raitner

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 and unleash human potential as described in the Manifesto for Human Leadership need first and foremost clarity about the nature of life and especially about their life. Only who has? And who takes the time today to think about the nature of life? A short excursion into Taoism exemplified by the evolution of the Manifesto for Human Leadership.

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Culture Follows Structure or the Misunderstood Scrum Master

Published by Marcus Raitner

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 Larman has summarized several observations as “Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior“. These “laws” nicely describe in various facets the inertia of hierarchical structures that implicitly always tend to preserve the status quo of middle and top management and established power structures in general. This hits the misunderstood and underestimated role of the Scrum Master particularly hard.

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The Workshop on the Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership

Published by Marcus Raitner

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 e-book. On the other hand, its theses also provide a useful framework for an interactive workshop in which leaders can reflect and discuss those theses and their respective stances. Exclusively for my readers I offer for free this brand-new workshop format.

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Equal Dignity as Guiding Principle for Successful Transformations

Published by Marcus Raitner

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 be questioned: away from the local efficiency optimum in the functional silo towards interdisciplinary cooperation along the value stream, away from long-term planning in a relatively stable environment towards sailing by sight in the VUCA storm and away from the pyramid towards the network as the prevailing organizational principle. However, such a radical change only succeeds if the people concerned are not merely “won over” as passive objects, but are allowed to participate with equal dignity in shaping the change.

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Aberrations of the Agile Transformation

Published by Marcus Raitner

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 like some sort of concentrated feed. Misguided by this promise of greater efficiency, an agile transformation is then ordered from the top and proven blueprints (Spotify and Co.) are evaluated and rolled out. This ultimately leads to an “agilization” of the existing encrusted structures and processes without rigorously questioning them. In the end there is hardly any transformation left but only agile label fraud: Same same but different.

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