Tag: lift13

Here are my live notes of the Lift Conference session “The Agile Enterprise: Rethinking what it means to manage”. Keep an eye open for mistakes, inaccuracies, and other flakiness due to live-blogging.
Abhijit Bhaduri

What makes an organization agile? Most people leave an organization because they are sick of the bureaucracy. With time, the organization grows, and starts looking a lot like the one the employee left before to join this one.

Two elements of agility, built around listening:

– Any place that connects to the customer becomes a listening post — that needs to remain agile.
– Ideas from the inside.

Agility: ability of a system to rapidly respond to change by adapting its initial stable configuration.

Wipro: growing company, lots of turnover, so lots of hiring every year (37K for 140K total). Challenge: keep a combination of youth and experience. Average age 29. 70% of the Wipro leaders started their career at Wipro.

Hire for skills, but mostly make sure they are a good fit for the organization. Hire for competencies.

India: large numbers, but very low quality of education in general *(steph-note: don’t I know it…)*

Wipro trains college professors on how to teach people science. Also younger classes. Moving on to STEM subjects in the US. Next three years: 120 teachers k-12.

Culture of the organization: need to be able to break your rules, those that made you successful.

Wipro started in 1945, small low-tech company. Today, high-tech, one of the worlds biggest outsourced technology companies. Design and test laptops, planes, vending machines… Consulting, infrastructure, solar panels…

Wipro culture: light many fires. 29 average age: restless, constantly benchmarking! Fund the entrepreneurs amongst your employees. Be prepared the fail. If you don’t do that they will take their ideas outside the organization. Failure is an investment!

Whatever the role, try and visit customers to understand what we’re trying to do better.

At the end of the day, agility at the company level is not about processes. It’s about trying out many different ideas, and something will work out. Also, Wipro has created a crucible of experiences to allow the leaders to grow. The novice is precious too, not burdened by the past. Keep the eyes of a beginner. Be constantly on the lookout for making things better and improving them.

Here are my live notes of the Lift Conference session “The Agile Enterprise: Rethinking what it means to manage”. Keep an eye open for mistakes, inaccuracies, and other flakiness due to live-blogging.
Dave Gray

Average lifespan of fortune 500 companies is decreasing. Also, as companies grow, average profit per employee decreases (=> less productive).

Shell: The Living Company. 100+ year life span, huge, and oil might run out: major shift, ordered a study on companies in parallel situations.

– decentralization: tolerate different activities on the edges (pods)
– platforms: strong identity, aloes, culture, beliefs (focus on that so the company doesn’t explode)

Evolutionary biology applied to companies: fitness. Fitness landscape: 3D diagram with tradeoffs on x and y and fitness on z.

One example of tradeoff: agility vs. efficiency (hummingbird vs. albatross)

First efforts are often clumsy. First planes were neither 747 of fighter jets.

First few tradeoffs, huge boost of fitness. But as you increase tradeoffs and optimize, the less your fitness increases, until it starts decreasing (you become vulnerable). So peak fitness is somewhere in the middle between perfect chaos and perfect order.

Too hot (chaos): Enron
Too cold (perfect order): Kodak — 1972, invented digital camera, and reaction was “why would I want to watch my photos on my TV?!” Didn’t manage to capitalize on that because the company was too cold.

You want to be in the middle, in the “just right” zone.

How do you build a flexible organization?

Traditional multidivisional organization is hierarchical. Popular organization: is networked, bubbles inside bubbles instead of a tree. Some organizing principles in the middle but semi-autonomous teams inside.

Pods. Morning Star turn tomatoes into tomato paste, that’s all they do. Marketplace of mutual accountability. P2P negotiation of contracts. No hierarchy or managers. Somewhat democratic government for resolving disputes. So every single person is a startup within the organization.

Whole Foods. Pods (teams inside teams inside teams) that are autonomous. Teams that are profitable can make the choice to grow or just keep the money. Team leaders run the store, store leaders run the region, etc. All the pods are relatively small teams.

Semco: every month the numbers are shared for open dialogue and debate. Employees share about 30% (check) of the profits. Book: 7-day week-end.

Platforms: shared services, finance, standards and protocols, culture. Providing some level of consistency across a popular organisation.

IBM: 90s, profit margin below zero. In deep trouble. Lou Gerstner new CEO. Ex-customer with a lot of frustrations as a customer. The very values that made IBM successful for so long are those that are holding the company back as the environment changes.

– excellence in everything we do: became an obsession for perfection
– superior customer service: became administrative, like a passionless marriage
– respect for the individual: became “anybody in the company can do pretty much anything without accountability”

Change the landscape by changing the platform/values. Very painful, but it worked.

Xplane, Dave’s company since 93. Dotcom boom, bust, financial crisis. 2006 major changes to go through. Infographics for change management. Created a culture map.

Whenever there was a decision to make they would look at the map. *steph-note: might be an interesting exercise to do for the individual too*

Can we do something like the BMG business model tool for culture?

Not ready for sharing yet… but soon!

Here are my live notes of the Lift Conference session “Resilience and Resistance”. Keep an eye open for mistakes, inaccuracies, and other flakiness due to live-blogging.
Konstantina Zoehrer, check out her speaker notes.

“Since we can’t change reality, let us change the eyes that see reality.” Will try and prove this quote true.

Greece: 20K homeless people, unemployment 25%, below poverty line 28%. 57% (unemployment? steph-note: missed something there.)

Was thinking of leaving the country. Studying. Started working, interest in social media and social networks. Started a community. Blogging. Landed her a job (“dream” job). 2010. But she still wanted to leave. Phone ringing, unknown number. Prime minister’s office. “You asked him on Twitter why you should not leave the country, do you want to ask him in person?” Whee.

She asked her question. He didn’t really give a satisfying answer. “Not leaving, etc. is a personal choice.” Disappointed.

Went back to Vienna. Found a job. steph-note: did something in Athens that I didn’t get. She decided to stay, this time. Tweeted to the Prime Minister: now that I’m staying, you’re leaving (he resigned). Realised that it was indeed a personal choice of hers to stay.

Examples of community-based initiatives. Digitally-organized meetings of people in front of the parliament. Not just demonstrations against austerity measures, but also discussion about solutions.

Fighting against food waste (giving excess to charities). Combating negative stereotypes in the media. Teaching languages in public libraries. Business startup community, entrepreneurship. Changing the insurance model. Symbiosis. Loft2work.

Here are my live notes of the Lift Conference session “Resilience and Resistance”. Keep an eye open for mistakes, inaccuracies, and other flakiness due to live-blogging.
Noah Raford

Who is sick of the future? Everything is accelerating, etc etc. We’re pretty bad at predicting the future. steph-note: NNT, Black Swan

Should we give up or try and predict even harder?

Example. Friend getting married in beautiful tropical island, but big project due at work the same week. Two schools of thought:

– book in advance, and lose ticket if you don’t finish the project (and risk losing cheap ticket price if you cancel)
– wait and see if you can finish, then book ticket (and risk paying more)

Anticipation (skate to where the puck will be).
Agility approach: doesn’t matter what’s coming your way, be a ninja, you can deal with anything. Joi Ito, “nowist”.

Big investments: usually, anticipation.
Lots of small decisions: agility.

But what goes on in situations where you have big investments and lots of decisions? “Strategic foresight”, what futurists call themselves when they’re embarrassed to be calling themselves futurists.

Speculative exercise. Look around at the present. What is change, what might change, imagine and rehearse your response. => conversations that are actually about today.

Thinking about bird flu, for example. How can we deal with various pandemic flu scenarios? Actually, this thinking by some shipping companies about how we’d deal with airline traffic being shut down helped them when the volcano blew up. They were wrong about the problem (no bird flu pandemic) but had something to deal with the impacts.

Even if our mental models where perfectly in sync with the outside world, over time they would inevitably get completely out of sync with the way the world has evolved — and not know it. Overconfidence.

Foresight: looking for change. What are we not aware of? Predator: seeing the unseen. Reperceiving the present. Talk about the future in order to perceive the present in a different way.

Tactical decision games. Imagine responses to scenarios. Makes one more mentally and socially resilient. Scenarios: containers for disagreement. You can consider things that are potentially dangerous to the present. Better be surprised by simulation than blindsided by reality.

Future of newspapers. Drones.

Lots of what we do (focus groups, etc), serves to reinforce our mental models of the present. Cf. “If I’d asked people what they’d wanted, they’d have asked for a better horse.” (fake Ford quote by the way).

The web is changing the way we think about foresight.

Christensen’s Curve. Futurescaper. Postcardurbanism.net.

Future of foresight (!!).

1975 John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider: every decision is basically a crowd sourced one (scary).

Here are my live notes of the Lift Conference session “Resilience and Resistance”. Keep an eye open for mistakes, inaccuracies, and other flakiness due to live-blogging.
Venkatesh Rao

The “blogger” here. Being resilient is getting up again and again after being punched down.

How can you be resilient? The more he thought about it, the more he realized the important question is the “why” of it.

The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing. Good and bad in both styles.

Fox gets up for new adventure. Hedgehog gets up for old passion. Turkey gets up out of habit. Different narratives.

Story 1: the stonecutters and the cathedral (stonecutters are fox, turkey, hedgehog). Fox: building a cathedral. Hedgehog: fastest stonecutter. Turkey: earning the paycheck.

Story 2: 3 stonecutters at Chesterton’s Fence. In the countryside. Fox: let’s build a bazar here! Fence on the road. Hedgehog: tear it down and put a stone fence. Turkey: hey hold off, we don’t know why this fence is there, it might serve a purpose, let’s not touch it.

Story 3: 3 stonecutters and the vicious dogs.

Morale: fox or hedgehog ok, but don’t be a turkey. steph-note: story incomplete, hope there is a complete version online somewhere.

Hedgehog resilience in Nature: the panda, knows how to look cute.

Foxy resilience: sea birds at Mira Flores, know “4-hour fishing” by Tim Seagull Ferriss.

Hedgehog resilience for humans: Transition Village, Val David, Quebec. Big organic idea of the world.

Foxy for humans: Jugaad movement in India.

Hedgehog mind: single model, one big idea, eliminate contradictions.

Foxy mind: slightly better at prediction, embrace contradiction, interdependence.

Every resilient hedgehog is alike, but every resilient fox is resilient in its own way. Hedgehogs are more predictable.

You can put people on a two-way chart (values, talents | fox, hedgehog).

Foxes: sacred = adventure, profane = boredom
Hedgehogs: sacred = love, profane = betrayal

steph-note: a few more charts I didn’t manage to capture here, check slides.

Law 1: build on contradictions, not values. Enterprise = adventurous voyage rather than institution, initially! Go boldly where no man has gone before, but don’t mess with pre-warp cultures.

Hedgehog: mint condition stamp (more damage, less value)
Fox: wabi-sabi bowl (more damage, more value)

Law 3: seek motifs, not truths. Globalization = container ships everywhere.

Law 4: pursue adventure, not love. Hojun Song’s devices: Global Orbiting Device (GOD), WMH = Weapon of Mass Happiness.

– build on contradictions, values will emerge
– preserve memories, identity will emerge
– seek motifs, truths will emerge
– pursue adventure, love will emerge

Act like a fox, your inner hedgehog will emerge! (but seriously, don’t be a turkey)