Making your Company a Better Place

Welcome to the future! Fellow revolutionaries! We are here to change the world. This is an invitation to meet here again on May 12, 2021. By that time, we will have transformed the Fortune 500. We will have transformed the government. We will have transformed the health sector. We will have transformed the education sector….

You might be wondering: how could we, the thirty people in this room, possibly change the world. We have few resources. We don’t have much money. We have little explicit power. We don’t have political clout in any conventional sense. So how could we possibly change the world?

The reason why we are going to be able to change the world is that we have a better idea. At the end of these two days, we will all own a set of ideas that will change the world.

With this compelling vision, Steve Denning, Seth Kahn and 5 Practice Partners (including yours truly) introduced the 25 participants into the world of Radical Management. Why did the 25 people come to take on such a daunting challenge? One participant, a senior manager at a large organization, explained it this way:

These ideas resonated with me. I work in a large organization and it’s obvious that command and control is a disaster and we need to aspire to these ways of working. In my company we just went through a change initiative that was about saving $10 million, but it was billed as bringing us closer to the customer. It was a complete lie. We are getting this wrong and the stakes are really high. We need this kind of thing so badly.

How are the new principles different from the old ones? Steve put up the following table:

Delighting the customers is more important than making money for shareholders?! How can than be?

Look at companies like Apple, Salesforce.com, or Amazon. Why are these companies so profitable and so well regarded on Wall Street? Because they delight their customers. They innovate. They create new value and learn to thrive in the 21st century. And they are great places to work. Look at companies like General Electric or Walmart. Their stocks have gone nowhere. Their command and control culture has not enabled them to innovate.

According to the Deloitte Shift Index, only 20% of workers are passionate about their jobs. Since 1960, the life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company has declined from 75 years to 10 years today! Innovation and involvement is crucial and traditional management is not doing the job!

At the Scrum Breakfast this month, we’ll explore this new work paradigm. If you want to change your company for the better, then check out this video and join us at the Scrum Breakfast in June!