How Agile Practices address the Five Dysfunctions of a Team ?
Since times immemorial, ideas, objects and experiences of grand stature and lasting economic, social and emotional value have been created by men and women working together in teams. Granted that some extraordinary work in the fields of arts, philosophy and sciences was done by truly exceptional individuals, apparently working alone, I suspect that they too were ably supported by other selfless and unsung individuals (in the backoffice, perhaps) who all worked together as a team. Right from the great wars, social upheavals, political resistance, empire building, freedom struggles and forming of nations and protecting its borders to the creation of majestic wonders such as Pyramids, Taj Mahal, Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, Sydney Harbor Bridge or the London Eye and many more, each one of them owes its creation and existence to teamwork. Of course, the scope of teamwork...
Toyota’s Wisdom for Tomorrow’s Managers
 I just completed first draft of this paper for business review magazine of a city college of business administration. If it gets selected for publication, you will get to read the full paper on this site :). Here is the abstract: Toyota’s pioneering work in automobile production systems continues to be among the most profound and radical departure from conventional thinking since the times of Henry Ford, and has led to unprecedented cost efficiencies and quality improvements for them. For long, it was thought to be a Japanese expertise – one that could not be duplicated by non-Japanese people, or outside Japan. However, subsequent to Womack and Jones’ pioneering works, “The Machine that Changed the World†and “Lean Thinkingâ€, it has not only been adopted outside Japan, its universal principles are also finding huge acceptance in other sectors...
What kind of “Managers stick with poor performers rather than hire new faces” ?
I am sure you have heard it in all versions, subversions and perversions, but one simple universal workplace truth seems to be don’t tolerate poor performance, and if not outrightly eliminate poor performers, do ease them out over a reasonable but fast period of time. The yawning gap between a bottom performer and the top performer is perhaps nowhere more so prominent as in a human-skill based knowledge industry like software. Over the years, various productivity studies still continue to point a gap of anywhere between 1:10 to 1:20 or even more between the top programmer and the bottom one. The exact number doesn’t really matter. What is important is to understand that success of a software endeavor howsomuch is dependent on very smart people, it finally needs a great team to deliver goods - no task is trivial...
Talk about Realistic Job Preview
One question that has always intrigued me is related to work and its associated challenges. How many of us truly believe that we (especially managers, even though generally true for all lesser mortals) are still in the jobs because it is not a perfect world ? How many of us sincerely believe that our jobs are in fact to fix the problems and not crib about their very presence ! If absence of those problems was a pre-condition to job, we might perhaps not be needed at all ! That said, it could perhaps be proved asymptomatically that when there is no challenge left in the job, that job might not be required anymore ! So, a noble objective of our job is to make our jobs redundant ! Wow !
Don’t believe in yourself if you want to succeed !
I look at life in a slightly unconventional manner. While most people might laugh at the title of this article, I am fairly comfortable with it. Let me tell you what I mean and why. I believe we human beings have some kind of narrowband and broadband combi-filters in our brains which work this way: the narrowband filter programs the brain to achieve lower than where it is set, while the broadband filter programs the brain to achieve more than where it is set. We don’t know where the threshold is when something moves from broadband to narrowband filter or vice versa. However, it is logical to assume it takes far more effort to move from narrowband to broadband than to slip down the other way. Further, if you train your mind to achieve less than narrowband threshold, you...