Blog

After chewing on it for a couple of years, this year I’m taking the Pervasive Leadership model I’ve been working on to a broader audience.  This is a leadership model for truly agile [...]

As I think back at the end of the year, I realize how much I have learned this year and how my perspective has changed or been enriched by my reading, training, and experiences this year.  Some [...]

There are not many great bosses.  Personally, since I know the origins of the term “boss,” I usually prefer the term “supervisor.” But, today, my task is to talk about one of my great bosses [...]

My generation was probably the first to be cautioned in high school that we needed to be lifelong learners.  At the time, the term was new, and I don’t know if it is in common parlance anymore, [...]

This blog is about re-patterning the human experience at work.  A few of the fundamental assumptions underlying these posts is that individuals have more control over their own work experience [...]

The other night I found myself talking with a couple of colleagues about a topic that catches my attention a lot lately: how we deal with failure. We were gathered around a tiny table at a local [...]

There are two interesting perspectives frequently brought into conversations regarding human systems: When a problem occurs, look to the system, not the individual. When a problem occurs, look to [...]

Is anyone afraid of change?  Why, what can take place without change?  What then is more pleasing to the universal nature?  And canst though take a bath unless the wood undergoes a change?  And [...]

The Scrum values are: Courage Focus Commitment Openness, and Respect To refresh my thinking on this topic, I recently turned to the Oxford English Dictionary. Courage originally referred to [...]

As children, many of us could hardly wait to grow up so that we could live by rules that accommodated our desires and what we perceived to be our needs.  Growing up has taught us that some of [...]

For much of my career, I would find myself angry with leaders who placed their personal interests above all else, whose courage failed them when faced with great needs for showing leadership, [...]

I like, so many of those of you reading this post, grew up in a culture where it is relatively easy to seek out and experience pleasure in many ways.  The very air is full of free and cheap [...]

Somehow I find myself talking about this topic repeatedly as an aside, so it’s probably time to address it at more length.  I usually refer to the power-over model or the power-with model when [...]

Leadership is a complex topic. Get any number of leadership experts in the room and ask them to define leadership, and you’ll get something that sounds like the mumbling of the jury at a Perry [...]

It’s part of the human perceptual framework that we make assumptions.  There’s a lot of data coming in, and we can’t catalog and analyze each piece without losing our minds or seeming to impact [...]

I was raised in a proud, warlike, clannish family.  As I realized when my grandmother was dying, and it became my mission to get the entire family to come home to see her, we are a proud, [...]

Double-loop learning is built into many agile processes, most notably Scrum, and is also the objective of the lessons learned process prescribed by the Project Management Institute Project [...]

Some of us spend a great deal of our lives waiting for or seeking “permission to begin” from others.  It’s a subtle thing.  It actually stops us from starting.  Waiting for permission—or even [...]

Many people are attempting to use agile sprint- or iteration-driven processes to build products in environments where traditional waterfall project management processes are built into the [...]

Organizations in all sectors—public, private, for-profit and non-profit—are struggling today with similar issues related to workforce productivity and performance against financial and market [...]