Old paradigms & practices It’s amazing how long outdated practices persist in our beliefs and our organizations. I can only speculate about the reasons for this: Perhaps because they are relatively simple and because they work quite well in the short term. Interestingly, the limitations of all these practices have been refuted early. Which are […]
Blame the Management System not the Managers
“The prevailing management system has destroyed our people” wrote W. Edwards Deming 1990 in the preface of Peter M. Senge’s book “The fifth discipline”, that I’m currently reading again. He explicitly referred to the fact that both managers and employees lose through the prevailing management systems, as his famous saying also expresses: “A bad system […]
What’s wrong with LEAN?
Most people think “Lean” is defined by reducing waste, less resources, less buffers and less people. Reading the definition of Lean carefully shows that it is defined by “more customer value with less resources”, which means a reduction of resources AFTER the creation of a better flow of customer value! In my opinion this misunderstanding […]
Small Changes: Synchronizing department meetings
“People are afraid of big changes, but usually embrace little changes. The best thing about little changes is they add up to one big one” (Simon Sinek). This also corresponds to my experience. Under the slogan “small changes”, I would therefore like to share in this, and in following articles, some ideas that allow for […]
Meetings, meetings, meetings. A new approach!
How does this work with meetings today? We have a topic to discuss or decide, think about which people we need and invite them to a meeting. But we are in a dilemma: If we invite too few people, the non-invited feel excluded. If we invite too many people, the meeting is tough and we […]
Gap Mapping: Transparency and Structure of Product Developments
In discussing what product development actually is, I like to argue that product development is the “management of uncertainty.” Unfortunately, many believe that it will only be possible to reach their goal with a detailled plan, that will only be executed. Such plans are often requested by management, so that only then a project may […]
The Management Paradoxon
People with influence on the system are usually too high up (and therefore too far away) to recognize concrete organizational problems, and People who are experiencing organizational issues and see potential solutions are too low to make changes to the system. In short: “You’re either too far away or too powerless”. This problem occurs in […]
Projects don’t work in a resource limited system
Why are projects no longer working in our product development organizations today? And why did they work for such a long time? . There are certainly many reasons for this, but in my opinion these can be traced back to one main cause: Today’s development organizations usually work not only at the limit, but […]
Personal Objectives, Performance Evaluations and Employee Ratings
Every year again, the phase of setting personal objectives comes. Because of to the huge effort behind it, more and more people are wondering how meaningful that is; especially in a lean and agile working environment. In fact, setting personal objectives are used today in almost all organizations and are often mandatory. This means that […]
The fundamental misunderstanding of agile Management
The new way of organizing and working according to lightweight and flow-oriented principles has led to a rethinking in many organizations and in many individuals. However, there are still some misconceptions, especially with the term “agile management”.