The Leader's Guide to Radical Management

The most beautiful blog in the world

One of the most beautiful blogs in the world—could it be: the most beautiful? or: the most beautifully written?—is Tony Lawlor’s blog: Dwelling Here Now. I have just come upon it today. And wow!

Tony is an architect and author. He says he is writing this blog to explore questions like—How do we live well on this planet? And: how can we find openings to dwelling here with wisdom, connection, creativity and delight? He not only asks the right questions: he points to where the answers may lie.

Here’s an excerpt from one of his blogs, which talks about Truth at the Edge

In the collective mind, the edge has an aura of romance… If you've found yourself at the edge, you know there's no glamour there. Actually being at the edge is clinging to the lip of the known and staring in the unknowable. It's realizing that the beliefs, love, possessions, physical stamina and whatever else stabilizes the center no long applies to emerging circumstances; new energies and insights must be accessed. The edge doesn't glorify the ego; that is the work of the center.

The edge is not a vacation choice or a thrilling distraction from the tedium of living. No rational person willingly ventures there. ..The edge is not the glowing horizon between heaven and earth. It's the faint border crossing between the wasteland and the unknown land.

At the edge, there's no turning back. Behind is the corpse of a life that no longer breathes. Ahead is the fear of annihilation in the abyss. Yet, the opportunity of being at the edge is dying to the known to discover revitalizing energies in the unknowable… The edge is not a dividing line separating hope from fear. It's the mixture of hope and fear that ignites the strange sparks of new creation.

I read Truth at the Edge this morning and then this afternoon, read more of his posts. I thought to myself: this is wonderful, wonderful writing: simple, profound, moving, generous, insightful and elegant.

Go to his site here. Read with a growing sense of wonder. You will not be disappointed!

Know of a more beautiful blog? Let us know, here!

See also

The most beautiful statistics in the world

The most beautiful fonts in the world

The most beautiful building in the world

Making a sales team (or any other team) agile

How do you inspire a sales team to become agile and collaborative? How do you transfer Agile practices from software development to work beyond sofware, for example, to sales? What relevance does this transition have for teams in general?

Thus a reader contacted me this morning and asked:

We’re a software company and have successfully implemented Agile for product development. We know it’s successful because we’re delivering more, higher quality software for lower costs. Your book has prompted me to look at a similar approach for other parts of our business – starting with sales. Can you provide any guidance?

My book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century, does discuss a number of companies that are applying Agile (aka radical management) practices to sales, including Xebia, Total Attorneys and Quadrant Homes. It also depicts the detailed practices needed to make Agile work outside the context of software development.

Often when Agile or Scrum is being introduced, all the thinking is about the mechanical or work programming issues, like getting the work organized into sprints, with a product owner and Scrum-master, preparing the burndown chart, and so on. Those issues are important but they are not the only issues.

In thinking about what specific adjustments are need to apply Agile practices beyond software, such as in sales, there are really two kinds of issues. One concerns the mechanical or work programming issues. The other concerns the deeper issues concerning goals, values and work culture.

Mechanical or programming issues

1.      Redefining the “product backlog”

In Agile software development, there is typically a "product backlog" in terms of improvements to be worked on and progress is measured in terms of the improvements that are completed.

Outside software, as in sales, the work looks different. Thus in sales, there’s usually a wide marketing component in which you try to get in touch with as many people as you can. And then you have actions to bring clients into different phases of the sales process. From contacts to leads, and from leads into prospects, and from prospects to a deal, or not. You measure your progress in these different phases. Basically, you are measuring your velocity in terms of your ability to complete deals. So in order to generate 100 leads, you need 500 contacts. And 100 leads will result in so many prospects which will lead to so many deals. In this way, you can measure velocity of the work and use that to steer.

2.      Adjusting the daily standup meeting 

Often a sales teams is on the road. So the daily standup meeting tends to become a virtual meeting, sometimes carried out while the sales people are driving towards their customers,

3.      Shorter work cycles

In software, work cycles are often two, three or four weeks. In sales, the horizon is often shorter, in terms of a week or even a day or two. One might have a weekly meeting where people talk about resourcing and the leads and the actions for the rest of the week are defined.  But the actual work cycle may be shorter.

4.      Kanban vs Scrum

One of the principles of Agile, Scrum and radical management is to set goals and then let the team get on with the work for the duration of the work cycle.

In sales there can be a larger of amount of opportunistic work. When new and better opportunities come up, you need to grab them, rather than following what’s in the plan.

This can sometimes lead to behavior that begins to resemble Attention Deficit Syndrome. If this is inherent in the nature of the particular context, then it may be better to switch to a Kanban approach, where there are a fixed number of “slots” of leads that can be worked on, rather than a formal set of prioritized leads. In Kanban, it matters less what’s in the slots than that the work is focused on a limited number of tasks that actually get finished.

5.      Not interrupting the team

Where the work is highly opportunistic and difficult to predict, it may also be difficult for the managers to adhere to the principle of not interrupting a team in the course of a work cycle. Some firms have dealt with this issue by giving the managers a limited number of “silver bullets” per work cycle, which the managers can use to interrupt "officially". Experience shows that that this practice can make managers conscious of the fact that they are interrupting the work and can result in the “silver bullets” being used rarely, or even not at all.

Broader principles of radical management

In addition to these mechanical programming issues, there are also several big picture issues relating to the deeper principles of radical management.

6.      Delighting the client vs making the sale

Radical management—and Agile at its best—entails a shift in goals. As a result of the transition in power from seller to buyer, the firm’s goal shifts from producing things to delighting clients. In effect, the firm’s focus shifts from inside-out (“You take what we make”) to outside-in (“We seek to understand your problems and will surprise you by solving them”). In addition to completing transactions, the firm endeavors to establish relationships with its customers.

Before introducing radical management into a group like sales, thought should be given as to what extent the people are already in the mode of delighting clients, or whether they are focused more on completing transactions. Where people have been compensated solely on whether they make the sale, it is likely that they will be transaction-oriented, and a significant transition will be needed.  

7.      Individualism vs collaboration

Thought should also be given as to whether the group is working in an individualist or collaborative mode. Where incentives are significant and based on sales by individuals, then the people are likely to be working in a competitive, individualistic manner, with a “what’s in it for me?” attitude predominating over collaboration to enhance the overall team performance.

The essence of Agile and radical management involve working collaboratively in teams. Before introducing Agile and radical management beyond software, thought should be given as to how much change will be involved in getting the group into a collaborative mode and how to make it happen. Change in compensation practices may be needed, as well as leadership storytelling to induce the organization and the people to embrace the change.

8.      Deeper reflection

Where people are under a lot of pressure to deliver, as in sales, this tends to foster a work hard/play hard culture. There often is not a lot of time spent on reflecting on what has been learned.

The essence of Agile and radical management is continuous learning and improvement. As one manager said after Agile had been introduced, “Whenever I come with a suggestion, there’s always somebody who says, “Why?” three times, as a kind of root cause analysis, which is not always what I want to hear, but it works that way.”

By contrast, in a work hard/play hard culture, there may be little inclination to reflect. So significant care may be needed in a sales group where reflection, learning and improvement are foreign to the work culture.

A deep change in work culture

Introducing Agile or radical management into a team beyond software such as sales, thus involves more profound changes than simply adjusting the work programming practices of the organization. In effect, it usually involves a wholly different way of thinking, speaking and acting in the workplace. As Mikkel Harbo of Systematic said to me: “When you introduce this, everything is different.”

Is it worth it? I believe so. Firms that have gotten into this mode and executed it well have found that it generates simultaneously high productivity, continuous innovation, disciplined execution, job satisfaction and client delight.

Dear Reader: Do you have experience in introducing Agile in a context beyond software development, such as a sales team? What did you learn? Love to hear from youL enter a comment here!

The Shibumi Strategy: An engaging fable about reinventing work

“There are times in life when if fortunate we experience a moment of utter clarity. We feel wide awake and connected and balanced: everything makes sense, we know exactly who we are, what we want and why we’re here. In that moment, be it one blink or a thousand, our effectiveness is maximized. And yet our actions seem minimal, effortless even, and the experience is consummately satisfying. These are breakthrough moments.”

So writes Matt May, the innovation author and design strategist, in his engaging new fable, The Shibumi Strategy: A Powerful Way to Create Meaningful Change (Jossey-Bass, 2010). Writers have struggled with inadequate English terms like “zone” or “flow” to describe such experiences. Matt May points out that the Japanese language has a word just for this: “shibumi”. His tale is about one such series of shibumi moments.

Where do such moments occur? Matt May believes that they can occur in the most unlikely places, like the sales room of a car dealership. His book is the story of man who seems to be losing everything, crushed to pieces by an inhuman workplace. And then through a series of shibumi moments, finds deep satisfaction and redemption.

The tale concerns Andy Harmon, a sales manager in his forties, who, on page one, is abruptly fired from his job, because the firm is cutting costs and moving all the jobs out of the country. Andy wants to live in the same city with his wife and two young children, and out of desperation grabs a job as a salesman in a car dealership. There are no other jobs in town.

The car dealership is not a pleasant place to work. Andy’s boss, Grady, offers Andy a no-salary commission-only position, and treats him as just another “human resource” to be kept on if he delivers and disposed of if he doesn’t. Andy must “move the metal” or he is out. It’s as simple as that, according to Grady, who won’t listen to any of Andy’s good suggestions as to how the work might be done better or differently. It’s “shape up or ship out”.

Andy tries diligently the master the job of car salesman, and covers the basics, but he has trouble closing a sale. He seems unable to master the high-pressure tactics that are needed to induce the distrustful customers who wander into the salesroom to buy a car. Andy is too decent a person. He is frustrated, but he needs the job, and he needs to make those sales.

I won’t spoil the read for you by describing the series of shibumi moments by which Andy is eventually able to find a way through the work-maze and induce change, not only in his own life but also in the world of the car dealership. Read it for yourself!

In the process, you will get a mini-education in Japanese management thinking, including genchi genbutsu (observation); hoshin (goal alignment); kaizen (continuous improvement) and hansei (reflection) which are applied successively in "the commitment", “the preparation”, “the struggle” and “the breakthrough”.

What’s wonderful about the book is the way that it calmly and dispassionately depicts a typical American workplace, particularly the way in which the workplace is unresponsive to any effort to improve it. For some time, Andy’s "commitment," “preparation” and “struggle” appear to be getting nowhere. It is only when he gets away from the workplace and practices hansie (“reflection”) that the breakthrough occurs.

When the breakthrough does occur, we are able to see more clearly what is so terribly wrong with that car dealership, as well as with so many of the workplaces in today’s organizations: the treatment of people as things, and the lack of any genuine human connection. We also see how even this unpromising setting can be transformed if one approaches the subject in the right frame of mind. In the process, we learn how the management can be reinvented.

I was hoping to like this book, because I enjoyed Trevanian’s 1979 novel called Shibumi, as well as Matt May’s two earlier books, In Pursuit of Elegance and The Elegant Solution. (Today's workplaces could certainly do with some more elegance!) And I am happy to say that my high expectations were met.

A short book, but a profound book, The Shibumi Strategy is a wonderful contribution to the emerging thinking about why and how we must recreate today’s workplaces so that they are more productive for the organization, more satisfying to those doing the work and more responsive to the customers for whom the work is being done.

Equally important: it’s a great story!

Cool meditation on learning, innovation, mastery: how to draw an owl

Very funny post by Ben Casnocha (via John Hagel) here. In particular, check out the insightful discussion.

CNBC: "A practical primer with compelling insight"

CNBC's Bullish on Books cites my new book:The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century

"The workplace needs more than a little "tweaking." Customers are frustrated, brands are unraveling, executive turnover is accelerating and workers are disgruntled. Now more than ever according to award-winning author Stephen Denning, what we need now is a radically different kind of management....

"Radical management is a fundamental re-think of what’s involved in creating a workplace where those doing the work are enabled to contribute their best on a daily basis so as to add a stream of continuous new value for clients.

"The Leader's Guide to Radical Management is a practical primer that offers practical advice and compelling insight to help meet the challenges of the 21st Century."

The CNBC also contains my article: "The New Bottom on Line of Business"..

Read it here

Hierarchy and its variants: The Matrix

In an earlier post, I discussed an alternative to hierarchy and anarchy that I called dynamic linking—a way of organizing that combines a sharp focus on the client, autonomous working conditions and disciplined execution.

One commentator asked whether there weren’t other alternatives. What about the matrix organization?

A matrix organization is a setup where you have not one boss, but two or more. It is really a form of expanded hierarchy, rather than an alternative to a hierarchy.

How does it work in practice? In my new book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management, I try to remind people of just how unproductive these working arrangements are by telling stories. One of the stories that I tell is is about a matrix organization—the story of Nathalie, the software development

The Software Developer

Nathalie, a software developer, is the head of corporate Internet solutions for a major insurance company.  

When she inherited the software development team it was facing a typical set of problems—software was late, over budget, and full of bugs. So she set about fixing the problems by introducing practices known as Scrum and Agile. She placed confidence in self-organizing teams that performed work in an iterative fashion, and the team rapidly became more responsive, efficient, and effective. After six months, the team had proved itself increasingly capable of delivering whatever software management wanted.

It gradually became apparent that the bigger problem wasn’t in the team at all. Rather, the organization could not make up its mind what it wanted.

The firm provided a full range of financial services. As a large conglomerate, the varied product lines and distribution channels would have presented a challenge for any team charged with improving customer experience across the board. For many years, the operating model had been a loose federation that provided each company with a great deal of autonomy.  At one time, scores of Web sites were associated with the firm.

Nathalie’s team was charged with consolidating and improving the user experience of the firm’s Web site. Although things began well, she could see problems. Under the Agile and Scrum methodologies, management was supposed to specify what software it wanted developed in the next monthly work period. But the various departments found it difficult to agree on what should be done. The implementation period would often start without the organization having reached agreement on what precisely should be developed. As a result, the software development team would begin working on something, only to find that the signals changed when it was halfway along with the work.

The group responsible for setting priorities was composed of representatives of interested departments. But the individuals in the group had no mandate to make decisions on behalf of their departments, and if they did, they were likely to be second-guessed. Time-consuming checking back with their constituencies slowed decision making to a crawl, and often a halt.

Compounding the problem was the fact that a duo of senior managers affectionately known within the firm as the Gruesome Twosome weren’t happy. The Gruesome Twosome insisted on signing off at certain critical decision points, and during their reviews, they would often second-guess the instructions that had been given to the team of software developers. As their interventions became more frequent and disruptive, the group charged with setting priorities became less willing to make decisions for fear of being reversed upstairs.

Nor were the Gruesome Twosome’s decisions entirely clear: the group setting priorities had no way of getting clarification from them and was unwilling to substitute its own judgment. So like the oracle at Delphi, the group deployed an ambiguous dialect that enabled them to be on the right side of the winning decision whatever it turned out to be.

Nathalie came to see that no one was held to what they had said in a previous meeting because everyone knew that decisions were provisional. The only constant was deniability. The more troublesome a problem was, the vaguer the language became.

Nathalie knew that her team of software developers was working well, but it wasn’t productive because the firm couldn’t make up its mind what it wanted.

Nathalie and her team are unproductive, not because they don’t know what to do or how to do it. It’s because they are embedded in a matrix where it takes forever to get the decisions needed for the work to proceed.

The matrix at the World Bank

I spent many years working in a matrix organization in the World Bank. It took around a year to process a development loans that financed complex multi-million dollar projects in developing countries. The projects were complex but most of that year was spent negotiating with the matrix—the various fiefdoms within the World Bank, i.e. the macro-economic department, the technical department, environmental department, the procurement department, and so on, as well as the bosses of these departments, who sometimes had different views from their own staff. In the meantime, the clients would be waiting for a year or more for these internally focused discussions to be completed before they could get their loans. Within the World Bank, time was almost irrelevant: it was more important to placate the various fiefdoms of the bureaucracy.

Paradoxically, there was also a procedure for “emergency loans”. When there had been a crisis, like an earthquake or a flood, the World Bank would put together a team to process an emergency loan. With this procedure, each department would nominate someone to the team, and it would be accepted, given the urgency of the situation, that their representatives on the team were fully authorized to make the best decisions that they could and their “home” departments would accept whatever they decided. As a result, the members of the team were fully empowered to get things done. And so the emergency loans would be processed in about six weeks, rather than one year. This was because the people doing the work could actually get on and do the work, rather than spend their time negotiating with the tentacles of the matrix. The clients were happy because they got their loan in six weeks rather than a year. And the people doing the work found it exhilarating because for once they were free to get on with the job, without being second-guessed.

From time to time, I would propose to the management: why don’t we process all our loans using the emergency procedure? Then all our loans would be processed in six weeks instead of one year. Reviews showed that emergency loans processed in six weeks were not of lower quality than “regular” operations that took a year. In any event, even if there was the occasional error, since we would be moving so much more rapidly, we would have plenty of time to correct the error in a subsequent operation.

My suggestion was always greeted with horror. Unthinkable! And why was it unthinkable? It was unthinkable because that change would have revealed that all of these reviewing departments and managers were not adding value to our clients. It was the people actually doing the work who were creating value for our clients. The reviewing departments were, as Vineet Nayar has said in another context, nothing but a shell, layers and layers of management and aggregators who had nothing to offer to our clients. These layers were not creating value. Instead they were wasting the time of the people doing the work, by requiring them to make endless presentations about irrelevant things and write reports about what they had or had not done. But this was the way the work had always been done and this was the way it was always going to be. End of discussion.

If my suggestion to process all loans on an emergency basis had been accepted, the World Bank would have effectively adopted a version of dynamic linking.

Dynamic linking

“Dynamic linking” means that (a) the work is done in short cycles; (b) the management sets the goals of work in the cycle, based on what is known about what might delight the client; (c) decisions about how the work should be carried out to achieve those goals are largely the responsibility of those doing the work; (d) progress is measured (to the extent possible) by direct client feedback.

The most complete articulation of the practices of dynamic linking in software development are set out in Mike Cohn’s Succeeding with Agile, and as applied to general management in The Leader's Guide to Radical Management, where I describe around thirty specific practices needed to make it effective.

As The Power of Pull points out, one proceeds “by setting things up in short, consecutive waves of effort, iterations that foster deep, trust-based relationships among the participants… Knowledge begins to flow and team begins to learn, innovate and perform better and faster.… Rather than trying to specify the activities in the processes in great detail.., specify what they want to come out of the process, providing more space for individual participants to experiment, improvise and innovate.”

Dynamic linking is productive and fun.

By contrast, the matrix organization is a variant of a hierarchy, and usually not a very productive one.

In fact, the matrix organization is like Kafka's Castle, and the natural home of the Dilbert-style manager, the manager who focuses on procedure not substance, communicates by ambiguous signals, never takes a personal stand on any issue, and plays for time, hoping to survive.

Having one boss second-guessing you is bad enough. Having multiple bosses doing that is hell.

Seven novels you must read before you are thirty

My daughter looked at The New Yorker’s recommendations for “the seven novels you have to read before you are thirty” and asked me whether I could come up with something better. (She’s 23). Without having seen their list, this is the list I prepared:

1. Marcel Proust: at least the first book of À la recherche du temps perdu. You haven’t lived till you have read Proust.

2. Leo Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich, as an appetizer that might lead you on to the main meal: War & Peace.

3. Plato: Symposium (shorter than a novel, but it gets in anyway: it had a huge impact on me)

4. John Lanchester: The Debt to Pleasure (a delicious mystery in every sense of those words)

5. Robert Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance

6. Kasuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

7. Jane Austen: Pride & Prejudice

The only overlap with The New Yorker list is #1: Proust.

Any other suggestions for novels that a young adult shouldn't live without?

No seed ever sees its own flower. We are here to do.

No seed ever
sees its own flower.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are here to do.
And through doing to learn;
And through learning to know;
and through knowing to experience wonder;
and through wonder to attain wisdom;
and through wisdom to find simplicity;
and through simplicity to give attention;
and through attention
to see what needs to be done.
                    Ben Hei Hei
                    Wisdom of the Jewish Sages
                    Spiritual Literacy
                    By Frederick and Mary Ann Brussat: P. 353.

Storytelling is a revolutionary force for change

When I’m discussing how to introduce leadership storytelling, I’m often asked: “Should I call it storytelling?” The reasons are twofold.

• It might be a business executive worrying that “storytelling” conveys an activity that isn’t serious or appropriate for a large organization to be wasting time and money on.
• Or it might be someone in the storytelling world wondering whether storytelling might have more success in the business world if it had a more business-like name, something that would link it more directly to the drivers of business.

It’s useful to begin thinking about the question from a historical perspective.

A historical shift

Shortly after I left the World Bank in December 2000 and began wandering around the world showing leaders in organizations, large and small, how to use the power of storytelling to inspire people to embrace change, I did indeed find some organizations that were embarrassed by the name. Early on, I would be engaged to conduct a workshop almost in the dark of night with a name like “Strategic Change Management” as if to ensure that the Chief Financial Officer would never find out that time and money was being wasted on something as irrelevant to business as storytelling.

Other organizations adopted a kind of middle ground and would use a euphemistic name like “business narrative”, which was not as misleading as “strategic change management” yet not as obviously unbusiness-like as “storytelling”. “Business narrative” implies that storytelling is a business activity.

Around 2005, as the leadership storytelling movement grew in scope around the world, and more and more articles and books about the use of storytelling in business, I noticed a change. When I would propose a workshop about “business narrative”, I would get a question: “Isn’t this about storytelling? Why don’t we call it what it is?”

Since then, storytelling has continued to gain recognition as a core competence of leadership. It is now standard practice to include a section on storytelling in books on leadership and change management, such as A Whole New Mind (2006) by Dan Pink, The Leadership Challenge (2008) by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, Made to Stick (2008) by Chip and Dan Heath, and Getting Change Right (2010) by Seth Kahan.

Linking storytelling to the drivers of business

Nevertheless, around 2008, I noticed that although storytelling initiatives would flourish for a period in large organizations, there was an issue of sustainability. Workshops would be held. Enthusiasm would grow. The CEO would endorse it. Plans would start to be developed to make storytelling a core leadership competence. But then something would happen. There would be a change in management. Or a merger. Or a cost-cutting drive. And suddenly the storytelling initiative would be sidelined, de-funded or de-emphasized or eliminated.  

In effect, the apparent victories over the Chief Financial Officer that I was seeing in the storytelling workshops and initiatives tended to be temporary. I was winning battles. But I wasn’t winning the war. The Chief Financial Officer and his minions would be lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right moment when they could stomp on this storytelling nonsense, “trim the fat” that storytelling represented, get back to maximizing efficiency, and once again have the organization focused single-mindedly on maximizing the bottom line.

This has led some to wonder whether storytelling might do better if it had a name that was not obviously at odds with the business drivers of a traditional organization. Would it be possible to come up with a name for storytelling that made it more acceptable to the Chief Financial Officer mindset?

The problem here is that the issue is one of substance, not the name. The fact is that the human values of storytelling—openness, authenticity, deep listening, adult-to-adult conversation, treating people as people—are at odds with the drivers of the traditional business: maximizing efficiency, command and control, treating people as “human resources” and manipulating customers so as to enhance the bottom line.  Attempting to link storytelling to the drivers of the traditional business inevitably results in a disconnect. The two activities are based on different values.

Moreover storytelling is a double-edged sword. Storytelling is a powerful communication tool that can be used to inspire people to embrace strange new ideas. But in the process, storytelling reveals very clearly the nature of those ideas. So if the ideas are unattractive or even unethical, storytelling will reveal that more powerfully than the meaning that the storyteller is hoping to convey. In effect, as often happens in leadership storytelling, the story that the listeners hear will end up being very different from the story that the leaders imagine themselves to be telling.

So although some executives and writers argue that the power of storytelling can be combined with the values of the traditional organization, this overlooks the fact that the power of storytelling rests on people-centered values. By contrast, the values of the traditional organization are related to things: making money, maximizing efficiency, exploiting people as “human resources” and enhancing the bottom line. Joining storytelling to the drivers of the traditional organization is like mixing oil and water. They don’t go together.

Storytelling as a revolutionary force for change

From this perspective, it becomes clearer why the Chief Financial Officer and his minions should be so intent on removing storytelling from the organization: storytelling is a revolutionary force that can begin to stimulate questions as to whether making money and maximizing efficiency should really be the be-all and end-all of organizations and society. Storytelling can begin to reveal the de-humanizing results of running organizations in this way and so spur a quest to consider more human-based alternatives.

Of course, subordinating storytelling to the values of traditional management might be worth considering if traditional management was doing well. But it’s not. It’s a disaster. The rate of return on the assets of US firms is a quarter of what it was in 1965. The life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 is down to 15 years and heading towards five years; only one in five workers is fully engaged in his or her work; traditional  management has also shown itself incapable of handling disruptive innovation, of generating new jobs or of coping with the demands of social media. Overall, traditional management represents a set of economic, social and political problems of the first order.

As a result, trying to change the name of storytelling so as to align more closely with the drivers of the traditional management is heading in the wrong direction. Instead, one should be using storytelling to change the drivers of the traditional organization and reinventing management, so that the organization generates high productivity, continuous innovation, disciplined execution, greater job satisfaction and client delight.

Read my earlier post for a quick summary of what’s involved in reinventing management and read my new book The Leader's Guide to Radical Management to get a detailed account of how to do it.

Design thinking is a subset of radical management: cool vlsual summary

Design thinking is a subset of radical management. It's discussed in Roger Martin's book, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (2009).

There's also a great short summary in this 36 page pdf D.School Bootcamp Bootleg which I was referred to by Riita Raesma @raesmaa from Helsinki, Finland.

It contains this really cool visual summary of the principles: