Essays on how organizations actually work.
If you've ever been reorg'd and thought "this is bullshit," guess what? You were probably right. The "Planning to Plan" thing always kills me In a 2013 McKinsey survey of 2,063 executives, 1,534 had experienced a redesign at their current
Role clarity is a symptom of relational poverty, and small team with real trust are going to out-deliver our absorptive capacity unless we do...something.
The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
TL;DR: We lack a shared, rigorous way to assess an entire organization – most tools either miss key drivers or apply only to specific domains. By meta-analyzing 102 criteria from 14 seminal sources, from Rams’ Design Principles to the Agile Manifesto to Jane Jacobs' Generators of
Here are four ways teams can go astray even if they have a fantastic, visionary mission – and what you can do about it.
Hundreds of thousands of hours are getting wasted on bad decision-rights. It’s got to stop. (Contains at least two good ways to fix this problem.)
I reviewed the academic literature on the potential for AI machine learning to automate certain professional tasks. Then I compared and ranked those functions against an actual marketing org – a mere 7% of which is strongly resistant to automation.
An approach that yields unbelievable levels of productivity, driven by a focus on the work that matters most for growth. In practice, this initially feels like cheating.
Included in this guide are a few ways to re-think your approach to development, some prerequisites to this approach, and three ideas for how to sprint toward a new way.
Five ways to structure your deck to be sure you're telling a story, not just writing action headlines and bullets powered by chatGPT.
A few standout practices: Opacity; Outsourcing for stronger internal networks; Deep technical reviews of ongoing programs.
I think it's because of org structure and approval processes. Implications for marketing organizations abound.
Researchers examined +200k teams to see how performance is distributed. There's a LOT of poor-performing teams, and a lot more exceptional teams than expected!
Centralization isn't a good thing or a bad thing. It's a pendulum that swings back and forth, and the key is to centralize and decentralize with intention. And to learn from what you've done.
Pace Layers help visualize, distinguish, and discuss different kinds of work and teams within an organization. Here, I bring together a bunch of great thinking into a single construct. Enjoy!
Explaining why big, transformative top-down projects never seem to work, and two simple recommendations to fix the glitch: less strategy; more structure.