Counterintuitive

4 years, 9 months ago

What Is a High Performance Organization?

First, let me say I am not talking about highly productive organizations. Productive organizations get more work done than expected. High performance organizations produce the unexpected. They not only produce more, they also produce “different”. Defining a true high performance organization is difficult. When we think about personal or organizational performance, we tend to see […]

4 years, 11 months ago

Ask The Right Questions

On any given week I am in a number of conversations with business leaders, business architects, or others who want to become business architects. They ask a lot of questions. And while all questions are good questions, some are better than others. Here are the two questions I get most often and what I think […]

5 years, 11 days ago

A Systems View of Business Architecture

A couple of weeks ago, Accelare collaborated with Penn State and Gartner Research to produce a 3 ½ day executive education workshop entitled “Enterprise Transformation and Integration: Beyond IT/Business Alignment”. I taught one of the sections but I also learned a lot from the other faculty members. Last week I posted a piece entitled Four […]

5 years, 6 months ago

You Can’t Sell Unicorns

Many of my fellow business architects are incredibly excited about the value an architected approach to business design can offer. They believe in the model so strongly that the value is intuitively obvious. They believe so strongly, they expect the value to be intuitively obvious to everyone else. Unfortunately, it isn’t.   Even with all the […]

5 years, 7 months ago

Think Different!

 “If you do what you have always done, you’ll get what you have always gotten.” This quote is variously attributed to the self-improvement guru, Tony Robbins, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Mark Twain, and perhaps others. The fact that it is so often quoted points not to its truth but to its implication – we struggle […]

6 years, 1 month ago

When Doing Less Gets You More

Booze&Co recently published an interesting article as part of their strategy+business series. The title of the article is Six Secrets to Doing Less, written by Matthew May. It is an excerpt from his new book: The Laws of Subtraction: 6 Simple Rules for Winning in the Age of Excess Everything. I haven’t read the book […]

6 years, 2 months ago

Functional Decomposition Isn’t Functional Anymore

Organizations today expect much more innovation from their employees than they did yesterday and will expect even more tomorrow. And not just technology innovation, but innovative products, services, processes, strategies, leadership styles, organizational designs, and more. This means that innovation isn’t just another function we can bolt on to our current role. It is a […]

6 years, 10 months ago

Wicked Problems

In last week’s post ,The problem With Problems, I presented a framework for defining and solving problems. I described how symptoms are often presented as problems, how the immediate situation exacerbates the problem, and how the context provides fuel to keep the problem nourished and growing. Three types of problems live within this framework: simple, […]