I don’t know how this year’s Super Bowl will turn out, but being from New England I’m naturally rooting for the Patriots. And I’ll admit that the New York Giants certainly give me reason to worry… However, it should be a great game!

This will be Tom Brady’s fifth Super Bowl appearance, an indicator that he’s been playing at an elite level for quite some time now. What does it take to be one of the best? Apart from his incredible work ethic and constant study of the game, Tom Brady focuses on a superb execution of the basics.

In his article Tom Brady still listens to QB whisperer, Tim Graham talks about how Brady recognizes the need for solid mechanics and works on them constantly. Interestingly enough, Brady still relies on Tom Martinez, his personal throwing coach since before he ever made his first junior varsity start.

Why? According to Martinez, a coach discussing flaws with someone of Brady’s caliber can be intimidating to the coach because the coach isn’t as good as the player. “So they hesitate to say things,” Martinez says. “Therefore, the player gets sloppy.”

Coaches shouldn’t be afraid! It’s up to coaches and leaders to make sure that people and teams haven’t strayed away from the fundamentals before we start making a bunch of other “fixes.” And bear in mind that those who are being coached might be experts at what they do, but often lack the perspective on what is going wrong with their own performance.

This was pointed out in the book, Unusually Excellent by John Hamm. Hamm observed that some of the greatest golfers on the planet went to coaches to correct problems with their game, and he noticed that the golfers had some very strong opinions about what they felt was wrong. And what did the coaches do? The coaches “…politely and deceptively ignored that line of thought and instead insisted that the golfer begin with the most basic fundamentals of grip, stance, posture, ball position and aim.”

Why? Because, Hamm explains, “Even the best performers, in any field, will slowly—and imperceptibly—stray away from the fundamentals of their craft. This drift is almost always invisible to them. The human nature part is that losing precision in the fundamentals is exactly the last thing most accomplished people would imagine or will accept as the cause.”

Agile teams can drift in the same ways. Putting too much work in progress at one time can cause teams to finish sprints with little in the done column. Or they stop tasking User Stories out or skimp on the basics in some other way. They drift from the fundamentals – and run into problems.

If you’re a coach or ScrumMaster, keep an eye out on the basics and gently guide your team back to those basics if you see that they are running into trouble. It can be very rewarding, just like John Hamm’s golf coaching story concludes: “I can't tell you how many times I've watched these professional golfers, after an hour of a supervised, disciplined return to the basics, begin to hit the ball as well as they ever have, and predictably turn to their coach and say, ‘That was it. You're a genius.’”

Be a coaching genius and keep your team focused on the fundamentals!

As long as you are the best.

For example, MySpace was first to market, generating an incredible following and was by all standards a huge success – THE player in what we now know and love as social media. MySpace was purchased by News Corporation and had all the advantages of professional management and financial backing to guide and fuel its continued growth. In effect, the social media market was MySpace’s to lose. And lose it did. To a company called Facebook launched by some college undergrads.

Why? Because while MySpace was an innovator, it wasn’t a leader. MySpace captured a sizeable market share by being first with a great idea – validating the existence of a market – but it failed to capitalize on its first-mover advantage. Instead, Facebook took the lead in truly learning about what customers wanted and adapting its offering, eventually taking the lead in market share.

Adam Hartung’s interesting Forbes article, How Facebook Beat Myspace, characterizes MySpace’s downfall as demonstrating the “…big fallacy of modern management. The belief that smart MBAs, with industry knowledge, will perform better. That ‘good management’ means you predict, you forecast, you plan, and then you go execute the plan.”

The danger in this, Hartung says, is that professional managers feel that you “…should be able to predict and perform without making mistakes. That once the bright folks who create the strategy set a direction, it’s all about executing the plan. That execution will lead to success. If you stumble, you need to focus harder on execution.”

In effect, MySpace lost its leadership through traditional management practices. Better execution on MySpace’s part using their current management/business practices would not have helped against Facebook. That’s because Facebook wasn’t attempting to predict the future with a “plan the work and work the plan” mindset. Far from it. As Hartung points out:
“...the brilliance of Mark Zuckerberg was his willingness to allow Facebook to go wherever the market wanted it. Farmville and other social games -- why not? Different ways to find potential friends -- go for it. The founders kept pushing the technology to do anything users wanted. If you have an idea for networking on something, Facebook pushed its tech folks to make it happen. And they kept listening. And looking within the comments for what would be the next application -- the next promotion -- the next revision that would lead to more uses, more users and more growth.” Hartung attributes Facebook’s success to what he calls White Space management, where you don’t forecast and plan, but get to market and learn. Facebook continually tested ideas and listened to its customers. This same approach is advocated by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen in Great by Choice and Eric Ries in The Lean Startup.

It’s all about using a low-cost, low-distraction, low-risk, empirical learning process to discover the truth about what works. The goal, Ries says, is to generate feedback and data as quickly as possible to learn what customer likes and dislikes; to understand how many people use a feature and find it valuable.

Another term for this is business agility, where agile and Lean principles are applied to create a learning, responsive and adaptive organization – one that is focused on delighting its customers by providing an intuitive product with easy-to-use features.

MySpace initially reaped the rewards of being an innovator, but lost in the long term because Facebook took the lead in learning and adapting its offering by being closer to the customer. While most business advice tells you not to compete with an established competitor, Facebook clearly had a hidden advantage in how they conducted business. Agility has its rewards!

In my recent post Charting a Course for Corporate Success, I outlined three, broad categories of innovation:

• Disruptive, Breakthrough Innovations.
• Sustaining, High-Value Change.
• Everyday Creativity and Emergent Innovation.

When it comes to leading businesses, it is important that we don’t just come up with new things; we need to innovate in ways that create value for our customers. As research by Robert Wolcott and Mohanbir Sawhney demonstrates, there are many different ways that business can innovate to achieve this outcome. They came up with twelve dimensions of innovation that we can consider:

Offerings: These are new products and services that are valued by the customer, like the iPhone.

Platform: A platform is a set of common components, assembly methods, or technologies that are building blocks that can be leveraged with a portfolio of products or services, allowing you to create a set of derivative offerings faster and easier than building them all from scratch.

Solutions: This involves creating a customized, integrated combination of products, services, and information to solve a customer’s problem. This can be an end-to-end solution that simplifies and reduces the logistics of something like procurement and delivery, for example.

Customers: The identification of new customer segments or unmet needs.

Customer Experience: This involves any and all things that a customer feels, hears, sees, and experiences in dealing with your company.

Value Capture: Innovation that discovers untapped revenue streams or expands the ability to capture value from interactions with customers.

Process: This type of innovation concentrates on the internal business activities and improving the efficiency of those processes.

Organization: This is a redesign of organizational structure and a company’s activities, possibly redesigning roles, responsibilities, and incentives of different business units and individuals.

Supply Chain: This involves re-sequencing activities and agents in the sourcing and delivery of goods and services.

Presence: This type of innovation focuses on the creation of new distribution channels or new ways of leveraging existing channels.

Networking: Innovation that concentrates on how products and services are connected to customers and how to improve and use those connections to create competitive advantage.

Brand: Brands communicates a promise to customers, and innovation in this realm involves extending the brand in some way.

The essential, underlying aspect of your company’s strategy is its distinctive competence and the perceived value of this competence by your customers. You need to articulate your purpose, and this requires a strong focus.

A great example of exquisite focus is found in the book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. While I personally lack experience in manufacturing, I can certainly appreciate the example of Crown Cork & Seal and its brilliant strategy crafted by John F. Connelly in the 1960s.

Back in the day, Crown Cork and Seal was a smaller manufacturer specializing in containers for “hard-to-hold products” like aerosols and carbonated drinks. The industry was dominated by three major competitors: Continental Can, National Can, and American Can.

It was a standard industry practice of most beverage companies to maintain at least two sources of can supply, and there was always the threat that a beverage company could purchase a can line and manufacture its own cans. In response to this, the “big three” can makers often set up plants close to a customer. Thus, the big can makers became willing, captive producers in order to benefit from long production runs (because there was a large cost involved with changing lines to make one can type versus another).

The net result were low profit rates of 4 to 5 percent return on assets by the major can companies. Despite being a smaller player in a difficult industry with low returns for major players, Crown Cork & Seal managed to be fifty to sixty percent more profitable than the big three.

How did they do it? Richard Rumelt posed this question to his executive MBA Class on strategy identification. And that meant digging and thinking deeply about the situation, looking for answers beyond information that was readily at hand.

Conventional wisdom was that Crown specialized in containers for hard-to-hold products such as aerosols and carbonated drinks, but that alone does not explain Crown’s success. Someone suggested that Crown must be the low-cost producer, since putting soda into a can is not a big technical feat and that Crown wasn’t the only company able to do this. And is it turned out, Crown’s unit cost per can was actually higher, not lower, than its competitors’.

“You can’t differentiate a can.” So how did Crown profitably differentiate itself?

Rumelt steered the class towards the real answer by drawing their attention on Crown’s policies and positioning to determine its true focus. The first two policies examined were those of providing technical assistance and rapid response.

The critical observations were that large companies don’t need technical assistance, and in fact are more likely able to give it. It is the small companies need assistance. Likewise, smaller companies also have less stable demand.

Related to demand instability, companies can also produce seasonal products or introduce new products that could lead to unpredictable demand spikes. A hotter than anticipated summer with a new beer product, for example, could create a situation for rush orders.

But there was more. Crown also had a manufacturing policy. Crown’s plants were actually smaller than its competitors, and none of the plants were captive. Not only did Crown’s plants service more customers per plant than their competition, their production of cans per customer was a lot lower.

In effect, Crown’s policies were different from the industry norm. Going for the “long runs” made the majors captive, but Crown chose to play by different rules in the same industry. Crown specialized in soft drink and aerosol cans with shorter runs. The runs may be shorter because the customer is smaller, because the product is newer, or because there is a rush order to cover seasonal or unexpected demand.

By specializing on a carefully selected part of the market, Crown increased its bargaining power with respect to its buyers and generated a greater return. Crown crafted a competitive, profitable advantage for itself in a very tough industry.

I don’t do justice to the Crown story in this post -- you really should read the book for a more complete walkthrough of strategy identification (and more). I found Good Strategy/Bad Strategy to be an excellent book on business strategy.

At a time when corporate survival rates are declining, what do companies – and leaders in particular – need to do to chart a course when maps aren’t readily available? You can’t “cut your way to glory” – at some point businesses need to innovate and grow. But how do you evaluate what the right direction is for your company? Where should you focus?

This is a difficult challenge, and unfortunately, there isn’t a step-by-step cookbook available to solve this problem. I’ve culled together advice from several sources to aid in charting your own course to success. Fair warning: This isn’t a process, just a framework for thinking that provides a little orientation. I’ll admit that is a lot easier pulling this information together than applying it; the hard part is involves thinking deeply about your own situation.

Prerequistes
Profitability as a Goal is Assumed: The business exists to be profitable. There is no need to state the obvious with a “directional” statement like, “We need to maximize shareholder value.” What information or guidance does this provide to anyone in the organization? The key objective is to determine (specifically) what to do and how to it profitably.

A Customer-Centric View is the Overarching Theme: In order for companies to succeed, they must convince customers to part with their hard-earned money in exchange for something you offer as value. Customers should be delighted in what you offer and in their experiences your company. Your value should be unique – distinctive competence is an oft-used term – and protectable in some way. Furthermore, you must be able to communicate your value proposition clearly to all concerned, from potential customers to your employees.

What is Your Purpose?
Three Key Questions that Help Define and Clarify Your Purpose: In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins discusses what he calls the Hedgehog Concept, which focuses on a single, unifying concept that provides a clarifying advantage, your core competency. Answering three key questions surfaces this clarifying advantage:

• What can we be the best in the world at? This is not simply an intention or a goal to be the best, but driven through an understanding of what you can be the best at.
• What drives our economic engine? Even in a commoditized industry, it is still possible to be profitable, but this requires deep insight into the economics and opportunities available.
• What are we deeply passionate about? Do the things that make you and those around you passionate. In a fantastic TED talk (included in my post, People Don't Buy What You Do...), Simon Sinek argues the companies should transcend simply “filling a need” to being companies who truly believe in something and “…do business with people who believe what you believe.”

Choose Between One of Three Dimensions of Excellence: In the spirit of not being all things to all people, The Discipline of Market Leaders advises us to choose one of three dimensions to excel at:

• Operational Excellence. An operationally excellent organization delivers a combination of price, quality and ease of purchase to its customers. Companies that excel in this dimension are well organized, valuing stability and predictability that are captured in efficient and effective processes. These organizations tend to be risk-adverse in comparison to product leadership organizations.
• Product Leadership. Product Leadership organizations deliver the best product or services to its customers, period. Companies that excel in this dimension are willing to push the envelope, to explore the boundaries into the realm of the unknown to deliver the best product or service. These organizations don’t just identify the current needs of the market; they look to the future needs of the market and work like crazy to get there first. Product leadership organizations are striving to meet needs that customers do not realize that they have.
• Customer Intimacy. Organizations that are intimate with their customers understand the needs of each and every customer and provide the best total solution for each specific customer. These organizations build bonds with their customers and are not viewed as simply a “vendor,” but as a trusted advisor by their customers. These organizations remain flexible and responsive to changing customer needs, seeking to build a long-term relationship with their customers.

Choosing one does not mean disregarding the other value disciplines. Companies must choose to excel at a specific dimension, but maintain threshold standards in the other dimensions.

Choose the Right Category of Innovation: Innovation plays an important role in defining your distinctive competence and corporate growth. As the The Innovator's Solution and Disciplined Dreaming point out, one size doesn’t fit all, and the same is true for innovation. Both books categorize innovation (The Innovator’s Solution mentions two categories and Disciplined Dreaming mentions three), so consider where you need to innovate in context with the dimension you’ve chosen to excel in and your current circumstances:

• Disruptive, Breakthrough Innovations. This is the most popularized form of innovation – the game-changing innovations that rewrite the rules of the game. Ford’s assembly line and the iPhone are examples. Everything doesn’t have to be about breakthrough innovations, however.
• Sustaining, High-Value Change. Innovations in this category focus on making existing products or services better. Adding new, compelling features to existing products, providing add-on products to existing products, or improving the efficiency of existing processes are examples.
• Everyday Creativity and Emergent Innovation. People can make small changes in the routine, everyday work that can ultimately add up to big results. I used the term emergent innovation in an article on the advantages of agile development to capture how the collaborative nature of agile development created the opportunity for small-scale innovations to occur. Examples include improving a customer experience on a service call or making a small adjustment to make a product feature a little simpler and easier to use.

Assess and Iterate. It takes a lot of time and effort to achieve a deep understanding of your industry and how your business can profitably approach that industry. As you consider your options, make sure that it is not too complicated or that the result does not become watered down as you socialize it within your organization. Your purpose should be clear, compelling and distinctive. If it isn’t, circle back and keep trying!

How Are You Going to Get There?
Define Your Strategy. Once you’ve decided what your company is all about, you need to determine how it will get there. There is overlap in what I've previously covered because strategic thinking is also involved in setting direction. For example, it’s not a good idea to compete head-to-head with an established incumbent. You need an advantage.

The book Product Strategy for High Technology Companies provides three questions that must be asked in order to have a complete, Core Strategic Vision (CSV):

• Where do we want to go?
• How will we get there?
• Why will we be successful?

A key to a good CSV is that is aggressive and mostly likely a stretch to accomplish, but it shouldn't be impossible or unrealistic.

An essential point is that goals do not equal strategy. “20 percent growth” is a goal – an ambition for a desired target condition – but not a strategy. Good strategies must define how an organization will proceed, and in the process it should be easy to rule out a variety of other alternative actions because they aren’t applicable to the stated strategy. In the spirit of the book Switch, leaders must script the critical moves.

As Good Strategy Bad Strategy tells us, strategy should be coherent. “…the resource deployments, policies, and maneuvers that are undertaken should be consistent and coordinated. The coordination of action provides the most basic source of leverage or advantage available in strategy.”

One final quote from Good Strategy Bad Strategy puts this all together: “Good strategy is not just ‘what’ you are trying to do. It is also ‘why’ and ‘how’ you are doing it.”

What About Vision Statements and Mission Statements?
I didn’t lead with these, but once you’ve considered what your company is all about – its direction, beliefs and values – and how it will get there, producing both mission and vision statements should be a simple exercise. (It’s the thinking that’s hard!)

The basic definitions of vision and mission statements vary, but mine are as follows:

A vision statement defines an organization’s purpose, but does so by incorporating Simon Sinek’s notion of the organization’s belief, articulating the organization’s values versus measures. A vision statement contains more emotional content than a mission statement and is a longer-term view that describes how an organization contributes to the world.

A mission statement is designed to be internally-facing, defining an organization’s purpose and primary objectives along with key measures.

For some additional information and examples, see my post, Are People Buying What You’re Selling?

I have to say that this book had me believing that I would dislike Steve Jobs because he came across as a spoiled (crying when he didn’t get his own way), arrogant tyrant to work for, a harsh and insensitive individual to be friends with, and a man who was distant and neglectful towards his family. However, Walter Isaacson balanced this view of Steve Jobs with a detailed treatment of the qualities that made Steve Jobs great.

One of those qualities was a sincere passion for creating great products. Steve Jobs had an overarching, personal mission to “put a dent in the universe,” and that quest led him to develop truly elegant products that delighted customers. Jobs also built highly successful companies, offering key perspectives that all of us should make note of.

Jobs felt that there were no shortcuts in building a real company. As Jobs said, “I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before.”

And he meant it. In talking about what went wrong with Apple after his departure, Jobs felt that chasing money for money’s sake rather than producing great products was the central issue with Apple’s decline: “Sculley destroyed Apple by bringing in corrupt people and corrupt values,” Jobs observed. “They cared about making money—for themselves mainly, and also for Apple—rather than making great products. Macintosh lost to Microsoft because Sculley insisted on milking all the profits he could get rather than improving the product and making it affordable.”

As we all know, when Steve Jobs took the helm again at Apple he re-focused on products. He also reduced Apple's bloated product line to create focus as well as eliminate confusion. He also took care not organize Apple into semiautonomous divisions. Instead, he made sure that Apple worked as one cohesive and flexible company, with one profit-and-loss bottom line. “We don’t have ‘divisions’ with their own P&L,” says Tim Cook. “We run one P&L for the company.”

Throughout his life Jobs was very outspoken, and he certainly had the courage and confidence in his beliefs to act on his beliefs – and to convince others to act. This was not always a good thing because not everything Steve Jobs touched turned into gold. Isaacson made sure to continually remind of us of something that was a constant reality when dealing with Steve Jobs: he had an intensity and magnetism to his personality that – when coupled with the courage of his convictions – created a “reality distortion field” (Bill Gates was reportedly immune).

Being drawn into Job’s “reality distortion field” meant that you were completely sold on whatever it was Steve Jobs was selling, despite any logical arguments that you may have had prior to engaging with Jobs. This was great if Jobs was right, not so good if he was wrong. This also seemed to have offset a great deal of Jobs’ weaknesses.

Love him or hate him, Steve Jobs was instrumental in building Apple and later turning it around. In between gigs with Apple, he enjoyed great success with Pixar Animation. I could go on and on quoting the insights that Steve Jobs had about creating great products and businesses, but it is better to read them for yourself in context with the situations that Steve Jobs was facing at the time.

Walter Isaacson clearly strove to provide a balanced perspective of Steve Jobs, and he certainly succeeded on that point. He left no stone unturned in chronicling the detailed history of Steve Jobs, and I didn't want for additional information! Be forewarned that this book is somewhat lengthy, and I'm sure that others will desire shorter, more entertaining biographies. I personally enjoyed the book and the balanced perspective, and Isaacson certainly left no stone unturned in chronicling the detailed history of Steve Jobs.

With Scrum, there are three questions that each team member answers in the daily standup meeting:

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What am I planning to do today?
3. Do I have any impediments?

These questions target the day-to-day work, but are there questions that can and should be asked as teams conduct a sprint review or a retrospective? Yes. And the right questions are a different set of questions that should explore the value that teams provide their company and the customer.

In a post, What have we LEARNED? by David :^{)} Koontz (this is two posts in a row that I’ve referenced his Agile Complexification Inverter blog!), David quoted a suggestion from Richard Cheng on what this set of questions should be:
"Let me tell you a true story. I was working with a Scrum team at a financial website. About once a month, there was a company meeting where they presented what they did to the other departments and executives. Their initial presentation contained information such story points completed, hours spent on stories/spikes/firefighting, and what they implemented. As the team really started to understand the goals of the company and the project and their place in achieving these goals, the team presented the following:

1. What have we done this month to help make our company profitable?
2. How have we excited our customers?
3. What we have learned?

"This is a fundamental shift from thinking about task based, to do list work to actually achieving goals and providing value. Helping your organization shift from getting value from the first set of presentations to the second set of presentations is a big part of what the Agile transformation is about."

-- Richard K Cheng, PMP, CSP But wait, there’s more!

What about management? If we all agree with Steve Denning that delighting the customer is paramount because, “By focusing on delighting the customer, the firm makes a lot more money than they would if they set out to make money,” then we have our next set of three questions for management to be routinely asking:

1. What are we doing now to delight our customers?
2. What are we doing to help our employees profitably delight our customers?
3. What new or different things should we start doing—and what should we stop doing—in order to profitably delight our customers even more tomorrow?

In the self-managed environment of Agile development, managers can come away feeling like they have a lot less to do. After all, management no longer directly assigns and monitors the work, right? A natural follow-up question might be: with autonomous teams, why do we even need managers?

Autonomy should never mean hands-off. Even autonomous teams need a helping hand every now and then. Remember the old saying reminding us that someone, “Can’t see the forest for the trees”? We all can get so involved with the details that we lose sight of the bigger picture. Managers happen to be in a great position to provide a broader perspective to teams that can contribute to more effective day-to-day decision making of the team.

I came across another piece of information to consider in Mike Rother's book, Toyota Kata. In it, Rother cited a research paper on continuous improvement at Toyota written by Professor Koichi Shimizu of Okayama University, which contrasted improvements carried out by production operators (via quality circles, suggestion systems, etc.) and improvements carried out by team leaders or supervisory staff.

Only 10 percent of productivity and costs improvements were realized by those carried out by production operators. 90 percent, on the other hand, were realized by those carried out by team leaders and supervisory staff. Why isn’t the situation reversed, where people closest to the work able to make more—and better—changes?

As Rother says, “It is physically impossible for production operators to work fully loaded to the planned cycle time in a 1×1 production flow and simultaneously make process improvements. Furthermore, many operators are just beginning to develop their understanding of the improvement kata and their problem-solving skills.”

For any of us who have been developers, the experience of not being able to find a bug in our code—after staring at the screen for too many hours—can be frustrating. Even more so when someone else stops by and noticing that you are deep in concentration, looks over your shoulder for a minute and then asks, “How come you are doing that?” and pointing directly to the very problem that you’ve failed to see all along.

Need a stronger example? Watch the following video before continuing:


I read about the original “gorilla experiment” in Great by Choice, and David :^{)} Koontz recently referenced this same Monkey Business Illusion a post where he made the case that, Yes – You Need a Full Time Scrum Master.

Someone needs to be looking out for the bigger picture, and that picture can be the flow of the team or the flow of the business. There are complex interrelationships between the actions we all take that lead to the customer, and it helps to have a mix of people who are handling the details of execution and the oversight of our processes as a whole so that we don’t overlook important observations that will make us more effective. Managers are in an excellent position to identify issues that those directly involved with the work might be missing.

In fact, Scrum masters, Product Owners and managers can all contribute valuable perspectives to team members working hard on the important details. For team members, this means that you shouldn’t box everyone out your day. For managers, this means that you should discover how to contribute to your teams without distracting them from their work. It’s not easy, but it is possible.

In the self-managed environment of Agile development, managers can come away feeling like they have a lot less to do. After all, management no longer directly assigns and monitors the work, right? A natural follow-up question might be: with autonomous teams, why do we even need managers?

Autonomy should never mean hands-off. Even autonomous teams need a helping hand every now and then. Remember the old saying reminding us that someone, “Can’t see the forest for the trees”? We all can get so involved with the details that we lose sight of the bigger picture. Managers happen to be in a great position to provide a broader perspective to teams that can contribute to more effective day-to-day decision making of the team.

I came across another piece of information to consider in Mike Rother's book, Toyota Kata. In it, Rother cited a research paper on continuous improvement at Toyota written by Professor Koichi Shimizu of Okayama University, which contrasted improvements carried out by production operators (via quality circles, suggestion systems, etc.) and improvements carried out by team leaders or supervisory staff.

Only 10 percent of productivity and costs improvements were realized by those carried out by production operators. 90 percent, on the other hand, were realized by those carried out by team leaders and supervisory staff. Why isn’t the situation reversed, where people closest to the work able to make more—and better—changes?

As Rother says, “It is physically impossible for production operators to work fully loaded to the planned cycle time in a 1×1 production flow and simultaneously make process improvements. Furthermore, many operators are just beginning to develop their understanding of the improvement kata and their problem-solving skills.”

For any of us who have been developers, the experience of not being able to find a bug in our code—after staring at the screen for too many hours—can be frustrating. Even more so when someone else stops by and noticing that you are deep in concentration, looks over your shoulder for a minute and then asks, “How come you are doing that?” and pointing directly to the very problem that you’ve failed to see all along.

Need a stronger example? Watch the following video before continuing:


I read about the original “gorilla experiment” in Great by Choice, and David :^{)} Koontz recently referenced this same Monkey Business Illusion a post where he made the case that, Yes – You Need a Full Time Scrum Master.

Someone needs to be looking out for the bigger picture, and that picture can be the flow of the team or the flow of the business. There are complex interrelationships between the actions we all take that lead to the customer, and it helps to have a mix of people who are handling the details of execution and the oversight of our processes as a whole so that we don’t overlook important observations that will make us more effective. Managers are in an excellent position to identify issues that those directly involved with the work might be missing.

In fact, Scrum masters, Product Owners and managers can all contribute valuable perspectives to team members working hard on the important details. For team members, this means that you shouldn’t box everyone out your day. For managers, this means that you should discover how to contribute to your teams without distracting them from their work. It’s not easy, but it is possible.

In the self-managed environment of Agile development, managers can come away feeling like they have a lot less to do. After all, management no longer directly assigns and monitors the work, right? A natural follow-up question might be: with autonomous teams, why do we even need managers?

Autonomy should never mean hands-off. Even autonomous teams need a helping hand every now and then. Remember the old saying reminding us that someone, “Can’t see the forest for the trees”? We all can get so involved with the details that we lose sight of the bigger picture. Managers happen to be in a great position to provide a broader perspective to teams that can contribute to more effective day-to-day decision making of the team.

I came across another piece of information to consider in Mike Rother's book, Toyota Kata. In it, Rother cited a research paper on continuous improvement at Toyota written by Professor Koichi Shimizu of Okayama University, which contrasted improvements carried out by production operators (via quality circles, suggestion systems, etc.) and improvements carried out by team leaders or supervisory staff.

Only 10 percent of productivity and costs improvements were realized by those carried out by production operators. 90 percent, on the other hand, were realized by those carried out by team leaders and supervisory staff. Why isn’t the situation reversed, where people closest to the work able to make more—and better—changes?

As Rother says, “It is physically impossible for production operators to work fully loaded to the planned cycle time in a 1×1 production flow and simultaneously make process improvements. Furthermore, many operators are just beginning to develop their understanding of the improvement kata and their problem-solving skills.”

For any of us who have been developers, the experience of not being able to find a bug in our code—after staring at the screen for too many hours—can be frustrating. Even more so when someone else stops by and noticing that you are deep in concentration, looks over your shoulder for a minute and then asks, “How come you are doing that?” and pointing directly to the very problem that you’ve failed to see all along.

Need a stronger example? Watch the following video before continuing:


I read about the original “gorilla experiment” in Great by Choice, and David :^{)} Koontz recently referenced this same Monkey Business Illusion a post where he made the case that, Yes – You Need a Full Time Scrum Master.

Someone needs to be looking out for the bigger picture, and that picture can be the flow of the team or the flow of the business. There are complex interrelationships between the actions we all take that lead to the customer, and it helps to have a mix of people who are handling the details of execution and the oversight of our processes as a whole so that we don’t overlook important observations that will make us more effective. Managers are in an excellent position to identify issues that those directly involved with the work might be missing.

In fact, Scrum masters, Product Owners and managers can all contribute valuable perspectives to team members working hard on the important details. For team members, this means that you shouldn’t box everyone out your day. For managers, this means that you should discover how to contribute to your teams without distracting them from their work. It’s not easy, but it is possible.

I view the basic distinction between leadership (“doing the right things”) and management (“doing things right”) as being fundamentally correct, albeit oversimplified. Various forums have raised the question of management versus leadership, with differing opinions on whether one person can be both a manager and a leader. Does this question change in an Agile context?

I believe so. With Agile, traditional lines between leadership, management, and working professionals are blurred. This is not a bad thing, but it is a different thing.

Agile development is about self-managing teams, which covers most of what Wikipedia defines as self-management: “The methods, skills, and strategies by which individuals can effectively direct their own activities toward the achievement of objectives, and includes goal setting, decision-making, focusing, planning, scheduling, task tracking, self-evaluation, self-intervention, self-development, etc.”

Of course, Agile development doesn’t go so far as to explicitly define self-evaluation, self-intervention, and self-development, but technical excellence is expected, as is reflecting on the team’s work, continuous improvement, and the learning that comes with raising and improving your game. As we move deeper into Agile adoptions and acceptance, it only makes sense that self-evaluation/intervention/development become an integral part of everyone’s repertoire.

Talk with any experienced manager and you’ll hear how certain employees don’t require any real management time at all—self-managed individuals have always existed. These employees work on the hardest problems, the most difficult challenges, and always deliver. Even when they encounter bumps in the road, these employees bring options to the table; they don’t “delegate up” and leave everything for the manager to decide. “If everyone was like this,” the manager typically says, “I’d have more time to focus on the business.”

What if self-management became a universal reality? Managers would spend less time managing and have more time available for leading. Managers could develop a deeper understanding of the customer and devote more of their time to setting business direction or aligning the business to better meet the needs of the customer. Managers could also spend more time looking ahead, guiding and preparing the organization for the needs of tomorrow.

Other types of leading can and should be distributed throughout the organization. The important distinction is that this leadership is built around a leader contributing to a desired outcome, not a reporting relationship where the work is judged by a non-participating individual who is “higher up” in the organizational hierarchy. (Reporting to someone is not necessarily the same as being led.)

Scrum, for example, has roles where a certain type of leadership is expected based of that role. Scrum masters are expected to have a deep understanding of Scrum and be able to guide and coach the team. Product Owners are expected to fully understand and represent the business, articulating the value and prioritizing the work based on delivering the greatest value first.

Leaders have followers, and those followers follow because they recognize that the leader has the knowledge and the collaborative skills to guide them in producing a successful outcome. There are people on teams who become leaders because they have expertise and collaborative skills, no title required. After working in a truly Agile context for a while, you should expect to see self-managed teams and individuals increasingly take their cues from those who establish themselves as leaders, regardless of where they are positioned within an organizational hierarchy.

For aspiring leaders, this places a premium on building relationships and the ability to work in team environment. This was recently reinforced by Right Management, who partnered with the research firm Chally Group to survey over 1,400 CEOs and human resource professionals from more than 700 companies globally to explore leadership effectiveness and development across regions and cultures.

This study found that the top reason for a leader’s failure is the inability or unwillingness to build relationships and a team environment. “What emerges from the survey analysis,” Bram Lowsky, Executive Vice President of Right Management says, “is that leadership success is increasingly dependent on getting along with others in the organization as well as with one’s own team. A leader must be able to connect, build relationships and be flexible enough to adapt to the corporate culture.”

Agile development has been increasing in popularity in recent years, and depending upon who you listen to, the following scenarios are possible in the near future:

• The foothold Agile has obtained in many organizations will spread beyond software and IT, gaining acceptance in other areas of the business.
• There will be an increase in failed implementations, with a subsequent backlash against Agile.
• The term Agile will cease to be used to identify any set of practices; it will simply be THE way that we operate.

I think all of the scenarios are possible; the first two are really about the expansion and growth of enterprise agility and in 2012 I believe that we will see a heightened interest and activity with the rest of the business incorporating Agile practices, mostly out of necessity.

I say this because, quite bluntly, corporate survival rates are declining. Consider the following statistics from The Shift Index study by Deloitte's Center for the Edge—which examined 20,000 US firms from 1965 to date—shows a dramatic decline in the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500:

• Only 74 of the original 500 companies in the S&P Index are still on the list 40 years later.
• The average life span of an S&P 500 company has steadily decreased from more than 50 years to fewer than 15, and trending towards 5 years.

Competitive pressures make business agility more important than Agile development, and in fact achieving true business agility will require adaptation of approaches designed for software development towards other areas such as business innovation—obviously a critical component in driving top-line growth that increases the likelihood of corporate survival. Agility is the new standard.

In terms of failed implementations, well, they will come as Agile expands. Using the wrong tool for the job is one way to drive failure. For example, I personally feel that Kanban works better for support organizations whereas something like a Scrum/XP hybrid is better suited for new product development. That’s not to say that one tool can’t work, it’s just that some tools are better suited for certain purposes than others. Force-fitting one tool for every job will invite failure.

Ignoring the people dimension is also one great way to drive failure. Pay attention to the ADKAR® model, or follow Jurgen Appelo’s advice on changing the world (building on the ADKAR® model and other research):

How to Change the World (new) View more presentations from Jurgen Appelo
Ultimately (how many years out, I cannot say), “Agile” as a term should disappear because it will be the standard. Right now it’s a convenient term to use while we’re undergoing a sea of change that involves the stripping away of the inessentials, of driving innovation and creativity with greater speed, of learning and adapting quickly—using new approaches to our work because we can’t drive faster execution using existing approaches (at least not in a way that is sustainable).

I started this blog in January of 2009. At the time, I wasn't quite sure of where I was going, only that I wanted to drive my professional development and get more involved in writing. I began posting once a week, and around the second quarter of 2010 I increased my posting to twice per week.

I'll confess that I was concerned if I could maintain a twice-per-week pace with my work schedule. I was also worried that I might run out of material. As it turns out, posting twice a week keeps the heat on me to continually learn and raise my game.

I am perpetually reading about Agile development and leadership topics along with thinking about what I've read and how new information and perspectives may (or may not) apply to our situations at work. When and where they are applicable, I strive to incorporate them into my routine and our Agile execution.

I also participate periodically on LinkedIN and other forums to engage with others, learning from what they are asking about and responding with. And of course, writing means that you must take a a position on whatever it is you are writing about. I find that exploring why I have a certain position can definitely lead to deeper insights and sometimes raises questions in my own mind that lead me to fresh information and new posts.

Since it's the end of the year, and I always like to take stock on what I've read throughout the year, and I can see how what I've read has influenced my thinking. Here's my list of business and self-improvement books that I read in 2011, in no particular order:



What I'm reading right now:



My goal is to build my readership in 2012, so please, if there are any burning issues or topics that you would like to see discussed, please let me know. And have a Happy New Year!

New products—or new businesses—should not make predictions early on, like predicting what features customers will value or how much revenue will be generated from a new product or business. These are questions that need to be validated as quickly as possible by getting in front of actual customers, not by making projections using a crystal ball.

Even if you capture “data” in a spreadsheet, it’s still wishful thinking until proven otherwise. Everything has the illusion of being real when reduced to numbers that add up in a spreadsheet. But just because the math works doesn’t mean that reality is being represented.

That’s not to say that some thinking up front isn’t helpful. You need to have a clear articulation of the problem that you believe needs solving—based on keen observation and thinking on your part—coupled with an assessment on whether there are enough potential customers in the market who are willing to part with their hard-earned money to purchase your solution to make their lives easier or better. And you need to be able to offer a solution at an attractive price point that will also make you a profit.

This is all part of your homework, but it is only one step in the full learning process. You need to make informed decisions on what to pursue, but once you start down a path, the reality is that you are heading into uncharted territory. And the information that you collect along the way may cause you to alter your course.

Metaphorically speaking, innovators are explorers that blaze new trails that settlers follow. Even if you are following, you are hopefully seeking some type of differentiation from your competition, taking an established trail up to a certain point and then splitting off from that trail.

Taking established routes allow for a greater degree of predictability, but at the point where you begin exploring, don’t waste too much time and energy attempting to predict very uncertain outcomes, like how much money you’re going to make. Likewise, excessive planning designed to exert control over your destiny to “ensure” (and predict) the success of an initiative is misguided.

Instead, invest your time and energy in discovering what those potential customers value. Use a low-cost, low-risk, fast approach to drive your learning to uncover the truth that I wrote about in How to Fire a Business Bullet. Learning obtained as a result of this discovery process may validate the direction that you were originally headed in, or it may cause you to adjust your course or it—with the benefit of leading you towards unanticipated growth and greater profitability than you originally projected.

This implies that we should follow traditional investment advice: Make what looks like a sound investment by doing your homework and invest only what you are willing to lose. Count your profits later, when you have satisfied customers who are paying you in real dollars.

As we approach the Christmas holiday—and since some of us are doing some last-minute shopping—I wanted to take a moment to wish you a Merry Christmas! And thank you for reading!

Have a warm and happy holiday. -- Dave Moran

Image courtesy of: suphakit73 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In his book, Disciplined Dreaming (A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity), Josh Linkner describes how his company ePrize won the business of UPS—but managed to enrage this new customer by doing something stupid: they shipped the first package of sales materials related to their very first promotion via FedEx.

How did this happen? Well, the employee who had the responsibility to mail the materials responded with, “Our shipping contract is with FedEx.”

Linkner says he learned two important lessons from this experience. First, a lack of awareness has what he calls a “gravitational pull” that pulls people into a state of semi-sleepwalking. The second is “the incredible power of rules and bureaucratic processes.” Linkner observes that, “People are quick to ‘follow along,’ believing it is more important to obey than to do what is obviously the right thing to do for their company.”

We all have stories like this, where people blindly follow procedure—even when it doesn’t make sense. Many times, people have been conditioned to operate this way. In an effort to drive consistency and predictability, organizations exert a strong dose of control through processes that become THE way of doing business, with no negotiation or deviation allowed. (Granted, some rules and procedures exist for legal or regulatory purposes and aren’t negotiable.)

Even for those who strive to do the right thing—to be more productive or to serve the customer better—it can be a frustrating experience to facilitate change in many organizations. Despite saying that they welcome constructive challenges, organizations can make the experience such an uphill battle that employees don’t consider it worth the effort to push for change.

The results are predictable:

• Employees aren’t as engaged in their work as they could be.
• Rigid processes can and will break down.

The solution?

Spend less time enforcing procedural compliance and spend more time engaging people by involving them more in understanding the business, who the customer is, and how their work contributes to delighting the customer. It takes extra time and effort, but connecting the work of your employees as directly as possible to the customer builds that awareness that Josh Liinkner talked about.

Loosen up and eliminate rigid processes! Provide guidance and a framework to work from, but don’t seek to control every aspect of people’s day. People want to do the right thing, but too much control leads individuals towards satisfying the process as their first priority. In other words, control can trump your intent of delighting the customer.

Sometimes—particularly in large organizations—it’s best to ask who the customer being served is. I don’t subscribe to the model of serving “internal” customers. True customers pay your organization in real dollars—and that is who your organization is serving. People need to be collaborating to collectively serve those real customers; focusing on internal customers can take people’s eyes off the ball and can skew thinking.

In my last post about goals, I noted that there needs to be a conversation between the employee and manager, discussing why a particular goal is important and how it will help the employee grow through a combination of experience and learning. Nurturing and growing people is definitely a good thing!

There is a difference, however, between growing people and perfecting people. I think that most of us would attest that most performance management systems in place today tend to lean in the wrong direction by spending too much time pointing out flaws that may or may not be important in the grand scheme of producing results.

After twenty or thirty years of performance reviews where individuals have had their imperfections pointed out to them repeatedly, you would think that many of us “seasoned” (yes, I’m in this category) employees would be damn near perfect by now. But we’re not. Well, I’m not anyway.

Growing people means expanding their capabilities and creating new strengths for the mutual benefit of the individual and the organization. If there is a serious flaw that is a true impediment for someone reaching a long-term goal, then by all means addressing that shortcoming is an important, near-term goal.

Growing means putting yourself in new situations where you are seeking to expand your abilities versus seeking situations where you can succeed based on your current abilities—where you are really looking for confirmation of what you can already do. This difference is the distinction between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset.

In his book Little Bets, Peter Sims describes a study by Dr. Carol Dweck, who developed the growth/fixed mindset distinction by studying how schoolchildren reacted to failures and challenges; if a student got a low grade on an exam, the student with a growth mindset reacted by saying and feeling something along the lines of, “I need to try harder next time.” The student with a fixed mindset, on the other hand, would say and feel something like, “I’m a failure.”

If you want to reach your full potential, you need a growth mindset because you are focused on the destination and not as concerned with setbacks that can and will occur along the way. And you won’t worry about whether you have “natural skill” or “innate talent.” A fixed mindset can stop you dead in your tracks and limit what you could become.

Do you have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset? In their book, Switch (How to Change Things When Change is Hard), Chip Heath and Dan Heath provide a short test for you. Read the following four sentences and determine whether you agree or disagree with each one:

1. You are a certain kind of person, and there is not much that can be done to really change that.
2. No matter what kind of person you are, you can always change substantially.
3. You can do things differently, but the important parts of who you are can’t really be changed.
4. You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are.

If you agreed with items 1 and 3, you’re someone who has a fixed mindset.

If you agreed with items 2 and 4, you tend to have a growth mindset.

If you agreed with both 1 and 2, you’re confused.

It’s that time of the year when performance reviews and planning for the upcoming year are taking place, and this means that we need to talk about the goals we achieved this year (or failed to meet) and begin making commitments to new goals.

Goals are useful, they give us all something to strive for; a goal describes what we want to achieve in the future. Goals should challenge us, with the recognition that meeting these challenges won’t happen without effort on our part. Because goals are something that we agree to take on, they will not only be challenging, they will be motivating.

Goals energize us because they give us purpose; they provide meaning to what we’re doing now and they give us a sense of achievement and satisfaction when we accomplish a goal. They also inform us about how we should prioritize activities that we are performing today. If something isn’t moving us forward towards our goal, it should be a lower priority.

Have you ever had a conversation about your own performance goals that concludes something like this? “That sounds good, and I hope I have time to work on it.” If this sounds familiar, you aren’t making a commitment. You have good intentions.

Commitment is much stronger than intent, and goals that are actually committed to take more thought and work to reach an agreement on in the first place. There needs to be a discussion between the employee and manager about the actual goal, talking about why a particular goal is important to that employee and how it will help the employee grow through a combination of experience and learning.

There needs to be input from the employee about what interests them, what they want to go after. And the manager must discuss the needs of the organization and where he or she sees opportunities emerging down the road. There needs to be a negotiation that leads to a mutual agreement.

The employee and manager must also talk about when this goal will be met, the measures used, and the commitment that the both will have—the employee in pursuing the goal and the manager in supporting the employee in pursuit of the goal. A two-way commitment should exist.

• As managers, we shouldn’t just assign performance expectations; we should talk about needs and expectations of the organization and have a robust dialog with our employees about those needs.


• As employees we shouldn’t ask, “What do you expect of me?” We should remain observant about our organization and be active participants in those robust dialogs on how we can develop ourselves to improve our overall contribution.

How do you view your goals? Are they something that you intend to do, or are they actual commitments?