Having sat through many organization’s strategic planning session witnessing nearly the same amount of SWOT analyses, I’ve come to the concusion that they rarely create value. It’s not that they NEVER are useful, it’s just that they typically get a team looking inward and backward as opposed to outward and forward. Further, SWOT can be disembodied … Continue reading STP over SWOT
Author: Chad Albrecht
I’m honored to have the Milwaukee Business Journal do a write up on my love of Taekwondo. Thanks Barb!
From a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) standpoint my personailty is often described as ENTP or ENTJ. With each letter describing where I stand in the four personality dichotomies, I’m (E)xtraverted, use i(N)tuition to make many decisions, enjoy (T)thinking about problems and am (P)erceptive or (J)udging in many lifestyle choices. The result I get just depends … Continue reading Life as an ENTx Leader
A good discussion by Steven J. Spear on how experimentation is useful when dealing with complex systems like markets and Mustangs. Spear explains how this technique led Toyota to the creation of Lexus.
There seems to be a ton of willingness today for companies to modify their legal relationship with their clients. Maybe we are finally at a point where we realize that holding people’s feet to the fire doesn’t produce the kind of results we had hoped for. What I’m talking about here is commonly referred to … Continue reading Agile Contracts
I just finished reading Deborah Mills-Scofield’s HBR article on bringing back corporate accountability. This is a great article in its own right. It lead me to an article she posted in April of this year on building Communities of Practice by Building Virtues into the Organization’s DNA. Her moonshots to fix problems we see in … Continue reading Revamp an Organizations DNA?
I have done source code branching with a ton of teams. The pattern looks pretty much the same independent of what type of branching the team is doing. “We are doing some work that we don’t want other teams to see or get impacted by.” So it goes the team creates a branch to work … Continue reading Is Branching a Dysfunction?
I spend a fair amount of time these days working with senior business leaders on some of the challenges they face. One of the things that both they and I are seeing is the impact of shorter business cycles on planning. While the use of the word “cycle” implies that these changes occur with some … Continue reading Agile and the Boom/Bust Cycle
There is a misunderstanding of Scrum and other processes and frameworks that anyone that follows the “rules” will be successful. Simply write some code in a two week Sprint and show it at the Sprint Review and magically all problems disappear. The people that believe this are missing a few key points. 1) Creation of … Continue reading Scrum, Skill and Dead Bodies
I talk quite a bit about the concept of intrinsic motivation in my presentations and workshops. Intrinsic motivation describes our satisfaction in doing something simply for the sake of doing it. Think of playing an instrument, solving a puzzle or painting a picture. The activity is a reward in itself. Daniel Pink’s “Drive” is great … Continue reading Intrinsic Motivation – Drive