Stuff we’ve been thinking lately
by Vasco Duarte Sometimes the life of an imaginary entity is rather easy. I never have to say ‘no’ to chocolate. If things get too busy, I can work 24/7. And I never have to negotiate my salary for the simple reason that I don’t get one. Of all the peculiar things of mankind, the...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte Although starting a new challenge is always great, the first couple of days at a new company often are not. New employee orientation usually is made up on the go. As a result, people can feel quite lost. As a friend of mine once told me, “You have no clue about what...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte It’s an important topic in a lot of companies: Who gets to decide what? Democratic decision-making sounds like an interesting plan, and it is. But only as long as the company stays small, it often doesn’t work in bigger companies. If you are looking for a new approach, maybe this blog post...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte I don’t know about you guys, but in times of stress I have (not so) quietly called one or two of my most hierarchical managers a ‘baboon’. And after seeing this video starring Dr. Robert Sapolski and some political savvy baboons, I realized I was right all the time. Sapolski has been...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte We believe that good management shouldn’t be just about practices, but even more about principles. Management 3.0 for instance isn’t a ‘method’. It’s a concept. On the other hand, in order to learn how to do things, people need concrete practices. Things they can work on, starting next Monday. One of those...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte *Ping* Ah, email. And a good one at that: my friend Robie Wood with a great story. Robie works at showVALUE, a company that specializes in agile management, training and other stuff like that. With 31 years of solid experience, he’s an old hand in the business. Anyway, he recently read Jurgen...
Read moreby Jason Little Over a decade ago, I was one of three people working in an early stage startup. This company was the first to create a mobile content creation and delivery platform for wireless carriers in Canada. One of the co-founders handled the content licensing, and the other co-founder built and maintained the platform....
Read moreby Vasco Duarte The most fabulous thing about not being real is that you have plenty of time to roam the Internet. And really, you can find some quite amazing things out there. (Have you always wanted to know how to make a cool sock puppet? Here you go!). Of course, I also use the...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte People always ask me tons of questions. Of course, lots of questions are about change management and organizational change. Lately I heard this one: “We want to work on innovating in our organization. How can we get started?” The story my friend Florian Hoffmann told me came to mind. Starting change bottom...
Read moreby Jason Little I’ve cited this study about change initiative failuresand also questioned its validity. I have observed that the core problems change management professionals and Agile coaches run into are (a)the projectification of highly uncertain pieces of work and (b)how organizations measure performance.These approaches work actively against the success of change initiatives. The ‘pieces of work’ I...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte By now you probably know my friend Tuomas Syrjänen and how they dealt with organizational change at his company Futurice. Elected ‘A Great Place to Work 2012’, but as you could read in these blog posts here, here and here, they have worked hard to get where they are now. And in...
Read moreby Sabrina & Seedbox Growth. It’s the magical word in economics. And sure, growth is good. But, as we’ve seen many times before, growth comes with a whole new set of problems. Take company values for example: you can put something in a mission statement, organize team-building sessions, focus on teamwork activities and, for good...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte As our CEO, excuse me, our Chief Ecosystem Officer, once poetically said, “A practice that has infiltrated the western business world like a pestilence in a shanty town is the annual bonus system.” The last couple of years we’ve all came to know some of the results of that of course. One of...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte I came across the story of Ryan Carson, who’s CEO of a company called Treehouse (pretty much the best company name if you ask me!) Ryan has been experimenting with organizational ideas for a while. After initiating a 4-day work week in the company (more effective and more profitable), he and Alan,...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte The French, they sure are a funny lot. They like to do things their own way. Heck, they even use a different word for computer just to annoy the rest of the world. At the same time they know how to live the good life. If wine hadn’t already been invented, the...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte How can you change – dramatically – a government organization? Well, big organizations and flexibility, that’s not always a match made in heaven. And when it comes to big organizations, few are larger than a government. My Dutch friend Berend van Duijvenvoorde told me the story of his heroic quest for agile...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte Although a lot of people I know get inspiration from management courses and books, there’s one thing they often ask themselves. ‘What can I start with this Monday? And then do Tuesday?’ Personally I don’t believe in books or practices that change the world overnight. Or on a Monday afternoon, no matter...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte Inspired by reading The Carrot Principle by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, Gary Shepherd wanted to give people the opportunity to ‘flag up colleagues they think deserve a bit of extra recognition’. But he told me he had to tread carefully, since the Brightside Group plc – the company he works at...
Read moreby Vasco Duarte Rob van Lanen, a Dutch consultant told me he often uses a Management 3.0 exercise called Moving Motivators. It’s a ‘game’ played with a series of cards with the intrinsic motivators on it. Motivators like freedom, honor, acknowledgment etc. Moving Motivators The game works as follows: you put the cards on a...
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