War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age

A digital company is one in which every employee has the opportunity to be an entrepreneur, as Ries puts it.10 Instead of forming an innovation team with the privilege of breaking the rules, the enterprise should set the rules—processes, practices, bureaucracy, people, management culture, and everything else—to support all employees in being innova

Jim Highsmith is on target when he says, “Productivity measures in general make little sense in knowledge work.”13 Designing good software and infrastructure, solving business problems, and creating IT strategies are knowledge work.

The humble leader recognizes that he or she has a fiduciary responsibility to deliver outcomes, yet cannot just order the world to be as he or she likes. He or she works for the complex system, rather than the other way around.

Writing a requirement is an arrogant gesture.

Just as DevOps lets us manage a seamless flow of capability creation, our IT systems architecture now consists of a seamless blend of components. It has become difficult to say where one product ends and another begins. The digital world is one of continuous, rather than discrete, elements.

If you can set up the rules and bureaucracy such that they allow good innovative ideas to have a path to execution, then you don’t need to distinguish between good ideas that come from a special innovation team from those that come from everyone else.

“Goals should not be about building products or delivering project scope. They should explain why such a thing would be useful . . . [they] should present the problem to be solved, not the solution,”

And the change to tomorrow is not accretive—to morph into the company it’ll be tomorrow, it will need to undo some of the doing it did yesterday, not just add more doing.

Let’s define agility as an organization’s ability to respond quickly—and at low cost—to new circumstances.

Given an uncertain future, anything that increases your cost of change also increases your risk.