Inspiring PeopleManaging TasksDelivering Results.
How did youi score? The Business Agility Institute‘s annual report provide valuable insights into how organizations are adopting agile practices. Comparing the 2023 and 2024 reports reveals a journey of challenges, recovery, and the critical importance of effective leadership.
Continue reading Australian Business Agility Report: Business Agility InstituteDespite its success, BCG didn’t always have it easy. The consulting industry has been undergoing rapid transformation, with newer, more agile competitors emerging, and the pressure to embrace digital technologies growing. BCG, like many traditional consulting firms, struggled initially to make the leap from its conventional methods to the new digital-first world. Their reliance on legacy business models meant that they had to play catch-up in some areas, particularly in tech-driven solutions like AI and machine learning.
Continue reading Why BCG’s Success is More Than Just Innovation: The Controversial Truths Behind Their StrategyWell, what do you think?
What? You thought manufacturing was a relic of the past?
Here’s the thing: manufacturing isn’t dead, it’s evolving – and there lies the opportunity for the brave.
Take a look at manufacturing through a different lens. It’s not a dying industry, but rather one undergoing a dramatic transformation. Headlines about “robots taking our jobs” and “the death of manufacturing” paint an incomplete picture. The reality is far more nuanced.
Sure, the days of smokestack factories and assembly lines churning out generic products are fading. But that doesn’t mean the entire industry is on life support. It simply means we need to rethink how we manufacture. The era of innovation and customization is taking over quickly.
Right here, right now you have an opportunity to disrupt, to take over and to take the lead in manufacturing.
Continue reading A Look At Manufacturing Through A Different lens – It’s Time to Reimagine, Not Retire.Quick, get the defib, this puppies dead, pupils fixed and dilated. What’s dying is the business model that bad leaders hold tighter than their quarterly earnings. In a lot of instances, our retailers are only alive due to diligent corporate CPR.
What made you relevant last year, won’t make you relevant this year.
The daily list of retail obituaries brings a tear to my eye. Jobs have been lost, money’s been lost and worst of all – a dream has ended – a dream that started with an entrepreneurial spark.
Continue reading I’m calling BS on the notion that the economy is causing the retail sector to die“What if we made design easy for everyone?” And just like that, the online design platform reshaped the game.
Design used to mean either paying a hefty fee to a pro or wrangling complicated software, Canva came in and disrupted the game. Here’s how they continue to disrupt and innovate.
Continue reading Positive Story: Canva – What can we learn from this ($49 Billion) great Australian company?This is one of my core principles. Everyday I work hard to ensure that members of my team can wake up with a sense of purpose. It sounds easy, but like most things in leadership – it’s difficult.
It’s a big goal to set. I try and achieve it every day – and to be honest I don’t always succeed. That’s why this is a team task. During the retros and during my walks and conversations with people, I ask and collect information that will help me work out how to make everyone ‘wake up with a sense of purpose’.
This is how we put a bounce in our team mates step, how we make them want to jump out of bed in the morning and how we inspire them to bring their best to work.
Continue reading Leadership Series: Wake Up With A Sense Of PurposeI was working with a client the other day and was asked how we attract such great talent to our projects. “Steve, you always seem to have the motivated team, the stars… that makes delivery easy”
Whilst attracting bright talent is a focus of mine (who doesn’t want to work with bright people?), we work hard at it, we also work hard at keeping them and maintaining the motivation.
Our underlying philosophy is pretty simple and is broken down into three points that anyone can use. Continue reading Leadership Tip: Inspiring Your Team
No-one likes a long running task. Day after day, coming in to work to do more of the long running task. Its a demoraliser…
I teach teams an agile/SCRUM trick, and that is to create your tasks so they can be completed within one day. This way you go home with a sense of achievement, not dread!
Impossible you say… well let me explain a bit more. I don’t mean Continue reading Leadership Tip Achieve
The other morning I was a guest presenter (I really don’t like that word… I interacted with people) at a breakfast with Deloitte in Brisbane. The topic was, agile, how I’ve implemented it and the results achieved at my latest client.
Half way through this session I chuckled to myself and coined the phrase ‘dirty agile’ – agile from the trenches. Since then I have received a lot of interest in dirty agile.
The term dirty agile reflects scrum after many retrospectives. The flavor of agile that we now run throughout this program can be clearly traced back to the manifesto principles and you can see its roots are in SCRUM, however it fits the organisation, their risk tolerance and low project maturity very well.
Jeff Sutherland – the founder of SCRUM explains that SCRUM is ‘onboarding for agile’. It is a set of ‘rules’ to get you going, it is not Continue reading Dirty Agile
Over the past 25 years of delivering solutions in multiple countries and multiple organisations I have never had the support from exec like I do from my current client. From the board, to the CEO to the executive directors, to the business… we are backed and supported.
This stacks the odds of makes top down, bottom up change, success heavily in our favor.
It is common for the CEO to walk into the program room, sit down with me and ask Continue reading Executive support is mandatory for agile