LESS! is released!


Whew! After six months of hard work, LESS!: Essays on Business Transformation is released. I should write something brilliant about this, but I just feel tired and happy. I'll go play with my son instead. I have deserved it, and so has he.

Just one thing: You may recall an earlier cover picture:


You may notice that the cover has changed slightly compared to the earlier version:

John Hagel III has written an excellent Foreword. Check him out. I am immensely proud that he wanted to do that for us. John is a great management writer. He is also Co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, and Director Deloitte Consulting LLP. I am currently reading his latest book, The Power of Pull.

Chances are you already do know about some of the LESS! authors, but I'll give you a list with links so you can have a look:

Dan Bergh Johnsson - Technology evangelist and blogger
Bjarte Bogsnes - Chairman of the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable Europe
Peter Bunce - Co-Founder and Director of the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable
Steve Denning - Consultant and former Director of the World Bank
Ola Ellnestam - Co-founder of Agical. Organizer of the excellent Agical Geek Nights(!)
Håkan Forss - Lean/Agile coach, creator of Visual WIP
Brian Hawkes - Founder of Foresite SPA
Maarit Laanti - Agile and Lean coach at Nokia
Henrik Mårtensson - Happy and exhausted
Karl Scotland - Advocate and pioneer of Kanban Software Development
Ari-Pekka Skarp - Coach and organizational developer at Nokia
James Sutton - 2007 Shingo prize winner, CEO of the Jubata Group, co-founder and president of the Lean Software and Systems Consortium

We have a wide range of expertise spanning finance, management, Agile, Lean, strategy, systems thinking, and complexity theory.

What can you, as a reader, do with it? You can start putting the pieces together. When laid out the way we have, it quickly becomes obvious that there are common themes, things we all need to do to make our companies work better. If we work together, we'll get better results. It is that simple.

By the way, in his Foreword, John does speak very clearly about what happens if one does not change. The things we are writing about used to be nice to have competitive advantages. Now they are necessary for survival. On the up side, once you try, they are fun and exciting to do. :-)

Now, I will go play with my son. Be seeing you!

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