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…
Year: 2018
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…
Agility and Alignment: Strategy as an Empty Sphere of Action
When it comes to agility, most people think of Kanban or Scrum at the team level. And then of course the many scaling frameworks come to mind like…
The Dead End of the Agile Transformation
Copying Spotify or simply implementing any other blueprint of an agile organization is a fundamental mistake. Not because the models themselves were poor, but because implementing a model of an…
Three Pillars of Sustainable Change: Empathy, Trust and Patience
Change and change management was yesterday. Today we are doing transformations. A digital transformation for business models, because data is the new oil. An agile transformation for the organization…
Leadership Is About Asking Questions Instead of Giving Answers
Leadership is about making others successful. This is the leadership philosophy of Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. The founder of the drugstore chain dm, Götz W. Werner, gets…
Where’s the Library?
Knowledge work requires concentration. To this end, universities have libraries in which one can focus on studying. In most of our companies there are no such zones for…
Digital Mass Graves of Knowledge
Almost half a century has passed since Ray Tomlinson sent the first e‑mail in 1971. A technology for a few nerds has gradually become a mass phenomenon at the latest since the…
Stop Starting, Start Finishing!
We really don’t lack opportunities and choices. There are always more ideas than can actually be implemented. This is true at the level of the individual as well…
How Jeff Bezos Banned PowerPoint and What to Learn from It
This is now the eighth year I’m blogging. I like writing. Writing helps me to get to the point. And by this I mean, really to the point and not…
Change Never Comes for Free
How do people cope with change? Family therapist Virginia Satir has provided an interesting model that can also be applied to organizational changes. A stable status quo is challenged…
The Benefits of Feature Teams
Agile methods and especially Scrum look very simple in a small product with a single team. As soon as several teams work on one product, the work has to be…
The Art of Ambidexterity
We are experiencing a world in which it is “normal that many things are changing and are changing more quickly than ever”, as Karl-Heinz Geißler so aptly put it.…
Leadership as an Encounter of Adults on Par with Each Other
Leadership is a matter of stance. Unfortunately, leadership is still defined in terms of power and subordination. The relationship between leaders and those being led is usually asymmetrical: the…
Network and Hierarchy: The Dual Operating System of Sustainable Organizations
As a manager today, it is necessary to have more abilities than just to climb the career ladder as far as possible. The hierarchy is without question an appropriate…
Leading with Purpose and Trust
The very essence of leadership is to provide orientation. That’s why leadership is crucial in agile organizations. Agility requires orientation to be effective. Without this orientation, agility becomes…
Agility Between Freedom and Order
Work in large industrial corporations is defined by processes, roles and standards — centrally planned, elaborated, documented, rolled out, trained and regularly checked for compliance. In return, there are ISO…
Diversity and Dissent over Conformity and Consenus
This is the second thesis of the Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership. In this second part of the explanations to the Manifesto, the concept of diversity is quite central…
Unleashing Human Potential over Employing Human Resources
Whoever sees organizations as machines and treats humans like cogwheels in them must not complain that people only work to the rule. Under these circumstances, more than working…
Corporate Rebels: Change Requires Disturbance
Aristotle once said, “A good man is not always a good citizen.” Accordingly, a good employee is not always an obedient employee. Organizational rebels cause disturbance and thus keep their…
Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership
At a time when it is “normal that many things are changing and are changing more quickly than ever” (Karl-Heinz Geißler), the role of leadership must at least be…
Agility, Empirical Process, and Falsification
Agility only makes sense in the light of uncertainty. If you know exactly what the customer wants or what the market needs, you don’t have to be agile…
Agile? Nice and orderly, please!
From Lenin comes the statement, which unfortunately cannot be denied entirely: “Revolution in Germany? It’s never going to happen. If those Germans want to storm a station, they’ll still…
Employee Advocacy: Word of Mouth in the Digital Age
Many organizations struggle to deal in a positive way with social media. Internally, a lot of the potential of networking in an enterprise social network is still untapped and externally,…
The Aesthetics of Failure
In Japan, there is the art of Kintsugi. In this traditional repair method, broken ceramics are glued with a lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum.…
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