4 years, 2 months ago

Productive Organisational Paradoxes

Here are the slides from my talk at the SCiO open day in London earlier this year. You can watch them static and download the slide-deck from here, or play it with animations below. Related posts: SASSY Architecture From Distinction to Value and Back What can Social Systems Theory bring to the VSM? QUTE: Enterprise […]

4 years, 10 months ago

Empower Autonomous Teams To Accelerate Digital Delivery

The need for speed has never been greater. Empowered customers are fickle. Big tech is disintermediating you. Disruptors lurk in the darkest corners of your markets, ready to rise kraken-like to swallow your floundering ship whole. Your prospects are b…

4 years, 10 months ago

Organizational Design Needs Deep-Rooted Change

Every day, executives lean in and light up when we describe the virtues of operating with true customer obsession, vowing to make a change. …and then they return to their reality. The entrenched design of their companies’ organization holds them back. …

4 years, 11 months ago

The Future Of Organizations

Forrester Vice President and Group Director Sharyn Leaver discusses the future of organizations — what companies will look like, how they will function, and how they’ll be managed to maximize agility and efficiency in the not-so-distant future.  Featur…

7 years, 1 month ago

The Ignorance of Management – Deep and Wide

While on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, an interesting graphic caught my eye. Titled “The Iceberg of Ignorance”, it referred to a 1989 study in which: …consultant Sidney Yoshida concluded: “Only 4% of an organization’s front line problems are known by top management, 9% are known by middle management, 74% by supervisors and 100% […]

7 years, 10 months ago

Auftragstaktik and fingerspitzengefühl

Two words: auftragstaktik and fingerspitzengefühl. To an English speaker, they might look kinda weird, but they’re key to getting an enterprise to work well… The terms originate from the German military, from around the early-19thC and mid-20thC respectively. They would translate approximately

8 years, 10 months ago

How to Build a Sustainable Business Architecture Practice

Starting a business architecture practice is definitely hard work, but building a sustainable practice is even harder. The data I am seeing is that 60% of business architecture initiatives are failing. The biggest challenge in moving from startup to sustainable practice is that the enablers for starting and propelling a startup forward are not the […]

8 years, 11 months ago

Why High Performance Organizations Are Hard to Build

Productive organizations get more work done than expected. High performance organizations produce the unexpected. They not only produce more, they also produce “different”. When most people think of organizational performance, they think first about productivity. Are we getting enough work done? And how do you get a highly productive organization – by focusing on efficiency. […]

9 years, 2 months 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 […]

9 years, 3 months ago

Three Essential Elements for High Performance Organizations

The elusive high-performance organization I have recently turned my thinking to high performance organizations and how to create them. Though most of us have worked in good organizations (and a few bad ones along the way), few have firsthand experience of really great, high-performing organizations. They are in fact very rare creatures. We know they […]