All posts by Rob England

I don’t believe anyone who knows for sure what to do. I don’t mean “We should build an electric car”. That’s vision. I mean “We can cover the roof with solar cells”. That’s hubris. There only one way to know if that is practicable.

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If you think:
….people should leave their social issues at the door when they come to work …
…your profits can be weighed against somebody else’s life….
…the purpose of a company is to make money….
….society’s problem is not my organisation’s problem …

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This year is only getting started.

I had to explain to someone today that Covid-19 isn’t over, we aren’t on our way back to normal.
There will be wave after wave of infection. More lockdowns.

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DeMarco wrote the definitive book, Slack, in 2000.
Yet 20 years later, managers are still driving people and systems beyond 100% utilisation in the deluded belief that it will get more work done.

This is wrong on so many levels:

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We see MBO making a comeback. Quite right, it’s Drucker.
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/the-only-management-technique-you-need-right-now.html

We would modify it in six ways for the 2020s:

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The world is increasingly VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous.

Not everyone has heard the term VUCA. Over 30 years old, it has been used by the military to describe the new geopolitical world, and increasingly it is used day to day to describe our lived experience. If you haven’t heard about VUCA yet, google it. We are not about to give you yet another potted history. We slightly changed the wording of VUCA = volatile, uncertain, complicated, and ambiguous. VUCA adds up to complex.

Why is the world increasingly VUCA?

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My Boeing scrapbook. I am updating this fairly often. I try to get them all but the horror stories come faster than I can remember to grab them. It is now huge.

The terrible saga of Boeing’s fall continues.  It has become a definitive case study of how corporate Friedmanism destroys a strong and healthy company culture by prioritising shareholder wealth over values, ethics, and human lives. This evil is the biggest force that Open Management struggles against.

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Here is an idea that makes Kanban boards more satisfying, more flexible, and easier to assign value.

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Fresh from the Teal Unicorn’s Instant Agility product labs comes our latest product: the Instant Agility Switch.

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Cherry has re-engineered our content about agile Management (small a) to talk about running a family. We have presented it several times in Vietnam at nominal cost and free online. It’s our contribution to social change.

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