LESS! is available on Amazon


LESS!: Essays on Business Transformation is now available on Amazon Kindle.

The hardcover version of LESS! is available from Lulu and quite expensive ($46.53). The Kindle and ePub versions are just $6.89. We do not use DRM protection, so when you buy the book, it is yours. You can put it on any device you want, and on as many devices you want. Please keep the copies in your family though.

I am very proud of LESS!. I am particularly proud of the fact that I did not write most of it. LESS! is a collaborative work, and working with the other authors has been a privilege I cannot adequately describe. One of my best adventures ever.

LESS! is about building better places to work:

Have you ever had a great idea crushed by the words, "we can't do that, because it's not in the budget"? Then you really need to read up on Beyond Budgeting. Bjarte Bogsnes, VP of Performance Management at Statoil and Dr. Peter Bunce, Director of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, have written two chapters helping you free yourself from the chains of budgeting.

If you look around you at work, and see people with great potential, but somehow things never get together like they should. The sum of the work is always less than the sum of what the individuals can do. Then Making the Entire Organization Agile, the chapter by Steve Denning is for you. Steve is a former director of the World Bank. He is a deep thinker with unsurpassed practical experience. In November 2000 he was selected as one of the world's ten Most Admired Knowledge Leaders (Teleos).

If you want to do Lean or Agile, what is you and your organization's position on Theory X and Theory Y? Why do you need to know about them? Because Agile and Lean are Theory Y based, and your organization is most likely Theory X based. X and Y ideas don't mix well. Not understanding the difference is a major cause of failure when implementing Lean or Agile. Dan Bergh Johnson's chapter Agile and Lean do not fit into Taylor's Glove will get you up to speed on the all important fundamentals.

And that is just for starters. There is lots more, by authors like James Sutton, Karl Scotland, Håkan Forss, Ola Ellnestam, Brian Hawkes, Maarit Laanti, Ari-Pekka Skarp, and me. And you might want to check out the Foreword by John Hagel III. John is a great author in his own right, Director at Deloitte LLP, and co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge.

I promised the Mexican photographer Herminia Dosal I would write an article about the story behind a picture she shot of me. At the time I made the promise, I did not realize how awkward I would feel putting myself on the cover of my own eMagazine, even though I love the photo. In the future, I will try to get Herminia's permission to publish some of her other work. Believe me, most of her models are far better looking than I am.
By the way, if you read the Introduction, you will find a link to the LESS! resource page. That is where we put links to free material you might be interested in, such as the Tempo! newsletter. The issue you see above is in review at the iBookstore right now, but you will find four older issues on the resource page.

If you do buy LESS!, please do write a review at Amazon, Lulu, or Goodreads. Honest reviews help me figure out how to make the next book even better.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Waterfall vs. Agile: Battle of the Dunces or A Race to the Bottom?

Image
The major software methodology wars since the mid 1950’s. Someone was wrong on the Internet, so here we go… In a recent HBR article, It’s Time to End the Battle Between Waterfall and Agile , the author sets up a false premise: There is a war between Waterfall methodology and Agile. The war must end. And finally, you can combine the approaches to get the best of both worlds. This sounds good, but the article is based on a misunderstanding of both Waterfall and Agile. Also, there is no war between Waterfall methodology and Agile. There can’t be, because Waterfall methodology does not exist! Waterfall is a name for large projects that failed in the 1960’s. Waterfall was never a methodology, but a failure to apply the methodologies that existed back then. As I will show towards the end of this article, at least one of the “successful” Waterfall projects mentioned in the HBR article was neither successful, nor a Waterfall project. I got invaluable help from Alistair Cockburn. He fact che
Read more

Performance Evaluations, Business Strategy, and Agile Methodologies

Image
It is performance evaluation time in many companies. This can be stressful, both to the people being evaluated, and the people doing the evaluation. In companies adopting agile software development methods, the tension can be extraordinary. Individual performance evaluations run counter to agile philosophy, which emphasizes team performance over individual performance. However, managers and corporate leaders need to take a few steps back, and consider the impact performance evaluations have on the organization as a whole. Especially now, in the midst of a recession, it is important to look at a companies current policies to see if they can be improved, or if they are actually holding the company back. So, how can a manager evaluate policy? Performance evaluation policies can serve as an excellent example. I'll confine myself to discussing the so-called ‘rank and yank’ methods. These are performance reviews were employees are ranked using a forced ranking system. It usually looks so
Read more

Agile Requirements Structures, Part 1

Image
If you have worked in large Agile projects or programs, you may have noticed that there is often quite a bit of confusion about requirements, what the requirement types are, their purpose, how to write them, how to use them, and above all, what not to do with them. There are many causes for this confusion. Here are some of the more common I have seen: Nobody in the organization has read up on the requirements model it is using, so everyone makes their own interpretation. The organization deviates from a standard requirements model, but nobody knows which standard model the organization is deviating from, and/or there is no agreement about how they deviate from it. The organization has not documented its own requirements model very well. The organization mixes two or more different requirements models, often without realizing it. The organization has documented its requirements model, but finding the documentation is an epic project in itself, on par with when Henry Sta
Read more