Posts by: Mike Rollings

Inversion of Control

According to Wikipedia, inversion of control (IoC) is an object-oriented programming practice whereby the object coupling is bound at run time by an “assembler” object and are typically not knowable at compile time using static analysis. The binding process is achieved through…

Luck, Serendipity, and the Contextual Strategist

Recently, @davegray @tetradian @nickmalik and I (@mikerollings) had a brief twitter exchange about the role of luck in strategy. What is luck anyway? Isn’t it just a happy accident, an unexpected happening, a simple explanation for the unexpected, a serendipitous association that…

Steve Jobs – Preparing Us for One More Thing

This weekend I read Steve Jobs eulogy written by his sister Mona Simpson. Anyone with a beating heart can appreciate it and will be touched by it. The love shared between them is apparent, as is the love he had for his…

Fight inertia and resurrect entrepreneurs

All organizations at some time in their history have experimented, gained knowledge, and operationalized it – experimentation is synonymous with entrepreneurialism. Entrepreneurs test many theories as they launch an idea. They are not afraid of making errors and learning from their mistakes.…

Context breaks Taylor’s hold on strategy

Last week’s post “Replacing Taylorism as our Management Doctrine” called for the end of Taylorism. Thankfully, I am not the first to call for the end of Taylorism or to write about human characteristics which businesses frequently ignore. There are many before…

Replacing Taylorism as our Management Doctrine

Over the last 239 years, organizations have been applying hierarchy, and top-down command-oriented management. This mindset erupted with the dawn of the steam engine in 1771, and in the late 1800s it was honed to razor sharpness by Frederick Winslow Taylor –…

Taylorism – A Pox upon Agile

This past Thursday my colleague Kirk Knoernschild pointed out a blog post by Alistair Cockburn about Taylorism creeping into the world of agile. Alistair’s post ignited a discussion within Gartner’s IT1 team reflecting on how it applied to our own agile work…

Gamification – a Small Play for Game Dynamics

Gamification, where organizations incorporate game dynamics into applications, is one of the latest trends.  Many view it as a silver bullet to load into marketing websites, innovation tools, worker productivity tools, ERP systems, and social environments. The hope is that these applications…

Watson: Impressive Finding not Thinking

National Public Radio (NPR) seems to wake my imagination.  This morning they had a story about IBM’s Watson. Watson is IBM’s computer that is squaring off against two Jeopardy champions – the shows air for the next 3 days. I wonder how…

A life out of control

So many things in our life are governed by the idea that we can control the outcome.  Take strategy as as an example.  For years strategists have operated under the false notion that strategies were conceived, plans created and execution of the…
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