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The Peer-To-Peer Bonus System

In a business that depends on collaboration, you should receive your bonus from your colleagues (not from your manager) with a peer-to-peer bonus system.

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Create Teams By Forming Crews

Are you creating teams, but do you find the word "team" overused and uninspiring? Try forming "crews" instead.

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The Sense And Nonsense Of Empowerment

Many people are wrong about empowerment. It's neither about softening dictatorship nor about introducing anarchy. I don't empower our workers, I empower the organization.

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Certificates Are Evil (But We Can Make Them Good)

Certificates with three-letter acronyms are often little more than valueless money-making schemes for institutes whose intrinsic purpose is to resist innovation. Good certificates confirm that people...

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30 Hot Books For Your Backlog

This selection of books is personal, highly biased, but well-curated. They are all less than a year old, and all of them are worth adding to your backlog!

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Ditch The Praise Sandwich, Make Feedback Wraps

When you need to give someone feedback, try offering a feedback wrap instead of a praise sandwich.

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Why Amazon And Google Fail

Even great companies will fail in some areas, just like the rest of us.

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7 Rules For Innovation Managers

To be innovative as a business, managers must learn to nurture creativity and creatively design their organization, using the seven rules for innovation managers.

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The Best Organizational Culture

The primary function of leadership is to nurture the right culture. And the best organizational culture is: minor changes, steadily building up, without triggering a backlash.

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Manage The System, Not The People

Managers should manage the system, not the people.

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The Change Habitat: 70 Percent Of Change Managers Are Wrong

What if change managers themselves are failing? Top managers should lead only one big change program: the creation of a change habitat.

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Better Ways To Reward Employees: Six Rules For Incentives

Incentives often go wrong. Before you burn your hands on extrinsic motivation, it's best that you focus on people's intrinsic motivation and the six rules for rewards.

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Don't Pay One Large Consulting Firm -- Invite 100 Small Ones

Instead of paying one large management consulting firm, you should invite a hundred small companies to swarm all over your business.

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I Don't Believe In Change Programs

Forget about change programs with frameworks, methods, steps, and phases. To become lean and agile, what your business needs, is to become a network of people who are running continuous experiments for...

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The First Qualification For Future Companies

I have come to believe that I found the Big Five Qualities for Future Companies. The first one is: Purpose.

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The Second Qualification For Future Companies

I have come to believe that I found the Big Five Qualities for Future Companies. Today, I want to tell you about the Second Qualification: Autonomy

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The Third Qualification For Future Companies

I found the Big Five Qualities for Future Companies. After the First Qualification: Purpose and the Second Qualification: Autonomy, I want to tell you about the Third Qualification: Connectivity.

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The Fourth Qualification For Future Companies

After giving the organization a purpose, acknowledging the autonomy of workers, and ensuring the connectivity of people, the fourth thing to do is to create transparency in the organization.

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The Fifth Qualification For Future Companies

Creating a safe-to-fail environment across a company is easily done on a Friday morning.

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If You Want Something Done, Delegate It Yourself

Delegation is not a binary thing. There are more options than being a dictator or an anarchist. If you want to get things done, learn how to delegate yourself.

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Growth Is Not A Goal

Why do many business leaders want bigger organizations? If the purpose of a company is merely growth, it is similar to cancer. Your company should try to be the best, not the biggest.

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Donald Trump's True Leadership Lesson

Forget all the standard advice about leaders that need to be humble, authentic, or supportive. Any kind of language and behaviors can work for you, as long as they trigger an appreciative response...

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What Is Your Most Innovative Management Practice?

Your business cannot become more innovative by only modernizing the development and marketing departments. Your company's core management processes need to be addressed as well.

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Why 'Management Is Dead' Is Stupid

If you choose to give management activities a new trendy name without speaking the language of the rest of the world, it will seem to us that you have no clue how actually to run a business.

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Measure Performance With A Scoreboard Index

The scoreboard index could be your next key performance indicator.

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Managing In Failure Mode

Managers should manage the system, not the people. Instead of dealing with specific situations and solving specific problems, the responsibility of management is nudging and constraining the system.

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Why New Workers In An Organization Must Embrace Confusion Rather Than Prevent It

New workers in an organization often find the business confusing. But documenting how things get done is rarely a solution. It's better to resolve confusion through communication rather than trying to...

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The Five Areas of Scaling Agile

Everyone who is trying to scale agile or be agile at scale is attempting to address some or all of these five scaling areas.

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How To Scale Your Business

The framework approach to scaling businesses fails to be a good fit for anyone.

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Agile Scaling Anarchists, Dictators And Networkers

Scaling networkers believe that rules, processes and tools should be introduced bottom-up, not top-down.

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Create A Safe-To-Fail Environment

To stay innovative and be able to run experiments, it is important that the value for customers and other stakeholders is continuously tested and validated in a safe-to-fail environment.

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From HR Professionals To Trust Agents

The goal of HR professionals is not to manage resources. Instead, the purpose of HR is to grow trust between the organization, managers, workers, and the government.

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Balancing The Gender Balance Discussion

A gender gap may or may not be a problem. More evidence and less opinion would be useful. But when it is, you usually can't solve the problem. It's easiest to ignore the multiple causes in your culture...

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The Only Valid Question For Managers

Management is about turning the parts (people and units) into a cohesive whole (the organization) that produces value for its stakeholders. And we can only achieve this by changing the way people behave.

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The Most Common Mistake All Managers Make

The single most common mistake for managers is to treat the organization like a machine. When we see organizations as living systems, a lot of traditional management practices suddenly stop making sense.

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Holacracy Is Fundamentally Broken

Holacracy is a top-down, bureaucratic, big government framework. It is completely the opposite of what agile, scalable organizations need in the 21st century.

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Stories Of Mismanagement

Mismanagement is like Miss World, Miss Earth, and Miss Universe. It raises eyebrows, makes few people happy, and is best judged with examples.

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Are Managers Smarter Than the Rest? Should They Be?

Yes, it’s probably true. Managers are (on average) smarter than non-managers! But, I don’t believe management jobs require smarter people.

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Management By Surprise

A complex system benefits from not following the same practices over and over again. By enduring a little bit of stress and continuously adapting to variability in the environment, the system learns to...

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Accountable Versus Responsible

In any value exchange between two people, each is responsible for his or her own actions, and for agreeing that he or she can be held accountable by the other. Sadly, this is often misunderstood.

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