think big and execute small.

Do less: cut out or cut down projects, cut out overhead that doesn’t deliver customer value, cut out or cut down features during release planning, cut out or cut down stories [requirements] during iteration planning, cut down work-in-process to improve throughput. At the same time, focus on delighting the customer by frequent delivery of value.1

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

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.

“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,”

Instead, digital transformation requires you to take a holistic view of your enterprise’s IT and organizational states. When you do, your transformational process becomes low risk: it’s incremental and consists only of improvements to assets you already own.

As an enterprise changes its way of working with digital technology, it will come up against resistance from both culture and bureaucracy. Such resistance is a necessary part of transformation, since both culture and bureaucracy are simply forms of institutional memory. In digital transformation, you’ll replace today’s bureaucracy and culture with

The real question for those leading digital transformations is how to maximize the business value they get from IT, not how to make projects finish on time.

“software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.”