The hyperbolic sales pitch from quick-fix Agile providers misleads management into creating lackluster, forgettable Agile. Agile today is a broken promise. Fifteen years after its birth, its core tenets are largely ignored, and most companies achieve few of the gains that are available. For those who aspire to adopt it…

Agile, real Agile, the stuff of legends, can be used in a marketing environment, and when done well, it changes the game of marketing. You’re about to hear proof of that…actually hear it. Why should Agile matter to marketing? Because the marketing function is one of the most chaotic functions…

Achieving our much-needed Diversity and Equity goals require that Inclusion is truly structural — Inclusion is the most important part of DEI: without inclusion, all your work hiring into diversity and assuring equitable compensation will be noble gestures whose impact is never realized. …

And can true leadership save it? — If one believes the latest cover story from the leader of promoting management trends, The Harvard Business Review, Agile is both everywhere and can be used for everything. Considering the business that I am in, I should be pretty happy as well. But I’m not. …

Excerpted with revisions from my upcoming book, Unmanaged: Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations. How well are your managers doing? In our upcoming research brief on workers and team productivity, based on a sampling of the over 200 professional services organizations we have worked with, confirms that…

Leaders, executives, and managers can face the new normal with confidence knowing that there’s a new way for teams to work more productively. It’s called “pods” and it has been proven to deliver improvements of 30% or more in factors like productivity, quality, and employee satisfaction. Managing Just Got Easier We humans evolved an…

It was the 1960’s and 70’s, when race and gender lines were still being tested — My father taught me a lot about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) almost fifty years ago, though I certainly didn’t realize it at the time. He was the chairman of the economics department at Northern Illinois University, a 20,000 student campus an hour away from Chicago. In the 1960’s and…

The Agile Toolkit wasn’t made for you. — In the world of business, the word “agile” has been over-used into virtual meaninglessness. It had a very specific meaning almost 20 years ago, and decayed rapidly under the distorting forces of rampant commercialization like I described in my How Marketing is Destroying Agile (link) article. In 2014, Dave Thomas…

Empowered managing matters more than ever — Work from home (WFH) is far more impactful than you think, damaging the fabric of connection that makes an agency feel like a family, and also destroying a key mechanism that teams rely upon: co-location. …