The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management by Stephen Denning

1. The Leader’s Guide to Radical Managementby Stephen Denning Amazon Reviews: Startling clarity, common sense, and immediate relevance Management Innovation is Radical! How and why radical management can clarify and magnify human capacity A Manifesto For 21st Century Management Rapid Feedback Management

2. Premise: The System is Broken • Marketplace has changed: customers have more information and demand better products and relationships • Workplace has changed: move from semi-skilled to knowledge work • The system needs to change: old structures constrain people, limit productivity, and do not address customer needs

3. Solution: Radical Management • Recognize and embrace the change that is occurring • Replace the daily grind with discovery and surprise • Engage, motivate, and challenge the workforce • Align personal, professional, customer, and corporate goals

4. Relationship to Scrum • 1993 Easel Corporation, Boston: Jeff Sutherland deliberated seeded a high-performance team by using improved communication, self-organization, sprints, and demos • Early 1990s Advanced Development Methods: Ken Schwaber used similar approach • 1995 SCRUM Development Process paper jointly presented; 2001 Agile Manifesto • Many Radical Management principles share a common philosophy with Scrum

5. 1: Focus Work on Delighting the Client • Producing standardized goods is no longer enough • Companies exist to create customers and cannot exist without them • Delighting clients is a motivating goal for employees • Clients become evangelists • Look at net promoter score: 0-10 satisfaction scale

6. 2: Do Work Through Self-Organizing Teams • Cognitively diverse teams outperform groups of like-minded experts • Self-organization requires that the team • is given responsibility • is working together • is focused on solving the problem • is accountable

7. 3: Do Work in Client-Driven Iterations • Business exists to satisfy customers and customers are the ones that know what they want • Allows rapid reprioritization and changes based on new information and needs • Allows value to be delivered sooner or cheaper • Defer decisions on what is in an iteration • User simpler, visible user stories as the placeholder for conversations about meaning • Test and validate early and often

8. 4: Deliver Value to Clients Each Iteration • Finish the most important work first • Be prepared before starting the iteration • The team is responsible for estimates • The team decides how much work can be done • Actively attack impediments • Measure progress in terms of customer value • Demos and retrospectives

9. 5: Be Totally Open About Impediments to Improvement • Increase transparency through: • daily standups • identification and removal of impediments • highly visible information radiators • Transparency is between team and management in both directions • Create safety nets and supports systems • Commit to fixing or avoiding impediments

10. 6: Create a Context for Continuous Self-Improvement by the Team Itself • Toyota: challenge, search for improvement, ‘go and see’, respect, teamwork • Practices: • get to root causes of problems • share but don’t enforce improved practices • foster communities of practice • give the team the opportunity to excel • remain open to new and outside ideas • management must support these activities

11. 7: Communicate Through Interactive Conversations • conversation is a dialogue between human beings • iteractivity requires good and active listening • storytelling provides unifying themes, goals, and purpose • user stories are a catalyst for conversation • stories provide framework for understanding who the team is, how they relate to other teams, and what they want to become