Agile Management

"[O]ne of the biggest wastes these days..is waste of talent, that a lot of people in the organization are capable of being far more innovative than they’re ever being asked to do."

"They don’t want to be 10 layers below a CEO just executing what some middle manager is telling them they should be doing. They want to be involved in important projects, feeling like a team, and feeling like they’re making important contributions."

"[I]f you create a great team, they are capable of doing far more than most management teams think they are capable of doing today."

"[T]he biggest challenge for traditional management– who wants to have a command control, hierarchical mode of working with linear timelines and dates and arbitrary commitments that are forced on the workers– this is like a total shift, because coming out of the lean context, lean is a pull system."

"[I]t means that a senior executive has to stop giving command and control orders to what a team should be doing. And they’ve got to stop fragmenting their best workers over so many projects. It is not uncommon for me to run into very capable senior executives who have no more than 5% or 10% of their time allocated to myriad projects, and that’s just catastrophic."

"[Y]ou [have to] understand the dangers of multitasking, what that does to the quality of the products, to the morale of the workers, to the productivity of the teams, multi-tasking is a killer. So we have to teach executives that it is not a good thing to fragment the workers. It’s not a good thing to overturn their decisions. It’s not a good thing to put 50 people on a team as opposed to nine people on a team."

"[G]ive the senior executives enough of an education that they don’t unintentionally kill the effort, that they don’t overturn their decisions, that they don’t interfere, that they don’t pull team members off partway through the project."

Understanding Agile Management. (2016). Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on April 23, 2017 from https://hbr.org/ideacast/2016/04/understanding-agile-management

Technical Interviewing is a Broken Process

"After drawing on data from thousands of technical interviews, it’s become clear to us that technical interviewing is a process whose results are nondeterministic and often arbitrary. We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process..."

"[C]oming up with interview questions and processes is really hard, so despite their differing needs, smaller companies often take their cues from the larger players, not realizing that companies like Google are successful at hiring because the work they do attracts an assembly line of smart, capable people... and that their success at hiring is often despite their hiring process and not because of it. So you end up with a de facto interviewing cargo cult, where smaller players blindly mimic the actions of their large counterparts and blindly hope for the same results."

"The worst part is that these results may not even be repeatable…"

"After looking at thousands of interviews.., we’ve discovered something alarming: interviewee performance from interview to interview varied quite a bit, even for people with a high average performance."

"At the end of the day, because technical interviewing is indeed a game, like all games, it takes practice to improve. However, unless you’ve been socialized to expect and be prepared for the game-like aspect of the experience, it’s not something that you can necessarily intuit. And if you go into your interviews expecting them to be indicative of your aptitude at the job, which is, at the outset, not an unreasonable assumption, you will be crushed the first time you crash and burn. But the process isn’t a great or predictable indicator of your aptitude. And on top of that, you likely can’t tell how you’re doing even when you do well."

"A noisy, non-deterministic interview process does no favors to either candidates or companies. Both end up expending a lot more effort to get a lot less signal than they ought, and in a climate where software engineers are at such a premium, noisy interviews only serve to exacerbate the problem."

"[I]n the absence of a radical shift in how we vet technical ability, we’ve learned that drawing on aggregate performance is much more meaningful than a making such an important decision based on one single, arbitrary interview. Not only can aggregate performance help correct for an uncharacteristically poor performance, but it can also weed out people who eventually do well in an interview by chance or those who, over time, simply up and memorize Cracking the Coding Interview. [E]ven after just a handful of interviews, we have a much better picture of what someone is capable of and where they stack up than a single company would after a single interview, and aggregate data tells a much more compelling, repeatable story than one, arbitrary data point."

Lerner, Aline. (2016), You can't fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview. Interviewing.io. Retrieved on April 21, 2017 from http://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-without-fixing-the-technical-interview/

Lerner, Aline. (2016), After a lot more data, technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary. Interviewing.io. Retrieved on April 21, 2017 from http://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-without-fixing-the-technical-interview/

Collaboration, Alignment and Distributed Decision-Making for Product Success

"[S]iloed product and technology teams lead to missed opportunities, project delays or sometimes straight-up project failure."

"When such teams are not aligned in process and execution, differences in vision and capability are not recognized until time, money and brainpower have already been spent. That’s far too late to discover they don’t see eye to eye on a product’s feasibility or potential value to the company."

"Very early on in the innovation process, product managers must partner with technical experts who can provide a real-world perspective into the scope of a proposed new product."

"Innovative companies must place a strong priority on distributed decision making whereby many people with skills in different areas are employed to come to a consensus on which products to pursue and how to proceed. Be forewarned that such processes require highly skilled technical personnel and a clear plan for how the group will come to actionable decisions. Establishing a highly competent product owner who can serve as a linchpin in the product lifecycle, removing organizational gaps and ensuring a more comprehensive product vision is realized, can help facilitate that process."

Digital Innovation Best Practices: Early Partnerships Ensure Success. (2017). Magenic. Retrieved on April 20, 2017 from https://magenic.com/media/2247/wp_mgnc-digital-innovation-best-practices-early-partnerships.pdf

Agile Model of HR

"[A]gile principles are key to supporting the kind of continuous learning, continuous talent acquisition, and transparent processes that enable organizations to attract, develop, and engage talent in the twenty-first century."

"The 'Agile Model of HR' states that human resources' job is not just to implement controls and standards, and drive execution—but rather to facilitate and improve organizational agility. This changes HR's mission and focus. Driving agility means driving programs that create adaptability, innovation, collaboration, and speed."

"[A]gile HR strategies include:

• Training leaders at all levels of the company to act as hands-on coaches, not 'managers'
• Designing the organization into small, high-performance teams that set their own targets
• Creating customer interactions within all groups and functions in the company
• Delivering a strong, focused mission and values to keep everyone aligned
• Creating systems with lots of transparent information, i.e., what are our goals, who is working on what project, who are our experts
• Implementing 'systems of engagement' not just 'systems of record,' i.e., collaboration, information-sharing, project management
• Building a focus on continuous learning and learning culture at all levels
• Implementing a strong external employment brand that attracts 'the right type' of people
• Hiring and promoting experts, not general managers
• Encouraging and teaching people to give each other direct feedback
• Creating programs for peer-to-peer rewards and recognition
• Developing programs to foster diversity in teams"

What is Agile HR? And is it right for you?. (2016). HRSG. Retrieved on April 7, 2017 from http://resources.hrsg.ca/blog/what-is-agile-hr-and-is-it-right-for-you

Agile Model of HR. (n.d.). Bersin by Deloitte. Retrieved on April 7, 2017 from https://www.bersin.com/Lexicon/details.aspx?id=15373

Bersin, Josh. (2012). Building the Agile Enterprise: A New Model for HR. Bersin by Deloitte. Retrieved on April 7, 2017 from https://www.slideshare.net/jbersin/impact-2012-keynote-josh-bersin

Jack Welch on the Role of HR

"HR is the driving force behind what makes a winning team. We make the argument that the team that fields the best players wins. HR's involved in making sure we field the best players."

Unleashing Productivity

Eliminate Bureaucratic Drag
"More people are working in big, bureaucratic organizations than ever before. Yet there’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productivity and organizational resilience and innovation."

"The average company loses more than 25% of its productive power to organizational drag, processes that waste time and prevent people from getting things done.... This often happens as a company grows, as the tendency is to put processes in place to replace judgement."

"A myriad of studies have documented the time lost to low-value management processes, from budgeting to the performance review....[A]s much as 50% of all internal compliance activity is of questionable value."

Create Pockets of Excellence
"The average company follows a method of unintentional egalitarianism, spreading star talent across all of the roles.... Companies like Google and Apple, however, follow an intentionally non-egalitarian method. 'They select a handful of roles that are business critical, affecting the success of the company’s strategy and execution, and they fill 95% of these roles with A-level quality'...."

"In addition, rewards were applied to team performance; no one person on the team could receive an exceptional performance appraisal unless the entire team did."

"'For every member of the team that is not a star player, productivity declines'.... 'If 100% of the team is star players, productivity is extremely high.'"

Raise Workforce Engagement
"An engaged employee is 44% more productive than a satisfied worker, but an employee who feels inspired at work is nearly 125% more productive than a satisfied one.... The companies that inspire more employees perform better than the rest."

Vozza, Stephanie. (2017). Why Employees At Apple and Google Are More Productive. Fast Company. Retrieved on April 3, 2017 from https://www.fastcompany.com/3068771/how-employees-at-apple-and-google-are-more-productive

Hamel, Gary and Zanini, Michele. (2016). Excess Management Is Costing U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on April 3, 2017 from https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-3-trillion-per-year