what readers
say
What Our Readers Think
This is the Agile book I've been waiting for. Enough with the rituals of process. Let's get into what really matters - creating the culture that teams need to thrive.
- Marty Cagan, Founding Partner
The Silicon Valley Product Group
"What is culture? How do we create a culture? What are our cultural problems?" These questions can have lofty, philosophical, theoretical answers that sound profound. Unfortunately, profundity rarely gets the job done. The authors have once again broken an important topic into easily understood parts. Not only have they made the questions understandable, they provide specific, actionable techniques for answering the questions and addressing the challenges. This book is as much a how-to as it is a what-is-it and why-do-I-care book. Everybody who is in a leadership role or deals with people in leadership roles (that'd be just about everyone, right?) should read this.
- Doc List, VP of Learning
Santeon Group
The content is phenomenal! Just an incredible distillation of years of experience.
- Christine DelPrete
Senior Director of Technology, Amirsys, Inc
From the Forward
"Change or any transformation activity is daunting. As experts tell us, "You don't change people, you can only change the process". So how do we as leaders motivate and inspire our employees and organizations to change?
"Command and Control leadership limits creativity, broad thinking and the ability for us, as leaders, to get the most out of the talent in the organization. The Millennials that we hire today are very social and interact and learn through social means in a very virtual and boundary-less hierarchy. Large organizations, by their very own weight, are not nimble. But, in this day and age of a social/cloud/mobile world, organizations need to experiment and pivot more rapidly. To compound this dilemma, process tends to govern too tightly with every exception or edge case being over-managed. Process becomes a controlling means to an end and not a guideline. Organizational outcomes tend to be measured in vanity metrics. Trust is completely eroded and creativity is muffled.
"Dealing with this requires a shift in our leadership model, a move from Command and Control to a collaborative model that builds trust within the organization, pushes ownership and decision-making deeper in the organization but that also has a good balance of process and policy. The outcomes demonstrate an organization with energy, and creativity, surfacing the talent and resilience to innovate and pivot as the business dictates."
Sue McKinney
Founder and President of McKinney Consulting Group
Former Pitney Bowes and IBM Vice President of Development