Sooner Safer Happier

"This is one of the most important Agile books since The Phoenix Project." —Charles Betz, Principle Analyst, Forrester Research It's no secret that we are living in the Digital Age. Technology companies make up seven of the world's ten largest firms by market capitalization. And the key to their success is the key to all modern organizations. Jonathan Smart, business agility practitioner, thought leader, and coach, reveals the patterns and antipatterns that will help organizations from every industry deliver better value sooner, safer, and happier through high levels of engagement, inclusion, and empowerment. Through his decades of experience in the technology world, Smart provides business leaders with a blueprint for creating a world-class organization of the future. Through Agile and Lean ways of working, business leaders can empower teams to improve production, grow together, and create better services for their customers. These better ways of working have overflowed from the IT department to every corner of successful organizations, taking root in every industry from aerospace to accounting, insurance to shipping. This book is not about software development. It is not a book about the computer industry. This book is about applying agility across the entire organization. It's a book that will put you at the front of change and ahead of the competition. "A true business-wide perspective on Digital Transformation and the need for whole business agility." —Adam Banks, Non Executive Director and Former CTIO of AP Moller Maersk **Note from the Authors: Purchases will result in the planting of trees and empowerment of women, in countries with the lowest scores on the IUCN's gender and environment index. It's not just carbon neutral, purchases in any format will result in, on average, 10x greater carbon offset.

As tech giants and startups disrupt every market, those who master large-scale software delivery will define the economic landscape of the 21st century, just as the masters of mass production defined the landscape in the 20th. Unfortunately, business and technology leaders are woefully ill-equipped to solve the problems posed by digital transformation. At the current rate of disruption, half of S&P 500 companies will be replaced in the next ten years. A new approach is needed. In Project to Product, Value Stream Network pioneer and technology business leader Dr. Mik Kersten introduces the Flow Framework—a new way of seeing, measuring, and managing software delivery. The Flow Framework will enable your company’s evolution from project-oriented dinosaur to product-centric innovator that thrives in the Age of Software. If you’re driving your organization’s transformation at any level, this is the book for you.

The Phoenix Project wowed over a half-million readers. Now comes the Wall Street Journal Bestselling Wall Street Journal bestselling The Unicorn Project! “The Unicorn Project is amazing, and I loved it 100 times more than The Phoenix Project…”—FERNANDO CORNAGO, Senior Director Platform Engineering, Adidas “Gene Kim does a masterful job of showing how … the efforts of many create lasting business advantages for all.”—DR. STEVEN SPEAR, author of The High-Velocity Edge, Sr. Lecturer at MIT, and principal of HVE LLC. “The Unicorn Project is so clever, so good, so crazy enlightening!”––CORNELIA DAVIS, Vice President Of Technology at Pivotal Software, Inc., Author of Cloud Native Patterns This highly anticipated follow-up to the bestselling title The Phoenix Project takes another look at Parts Unlimited, this time from the perspective of software development. In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals. One day, she is approached by a ragtag bunch of misfits who say they want to overthrow the existing order, to liberate developers, to bring joy back to technology work, and to enable the business to win in a time of digital disruption. To her surprise, she finds herself drawn ever further into this movement, eventually becoming one of the leaders of the Rebellion, which puts her in the crosshairs of some familiar and very dangerous enemies. The Age of Software is here, and another mass extinction event looms—this is a story about rebel developers and business leaders working together, racing against time to innovate, survive, and thrive in a time of unprecedented uncertainty...and opportunity. “The Unicorn Project provides insanely useful insights on how to improve your technology business.”—DOMINICA DEGRANDIS, author of Making Work Visible and Director of Digital Transformation at Tasktop ——— “My goal in writing The Unicorn Project was to explore and reveal the necessary but invisible structures required to make developers (and all engineers) productive, and reveal the devastating effects of technical debt and complexity. I hope this book can create common ground for technology and business leaders to leave the past behind, and co-create a better future together.”—Gene Kim, November 2019

A successful digital transformation must start with a conversational transformation. Today, software organizations are transforming the way work gets done through practices like Agile, Lean, and DevOps. But as commonly implemented as these methods are, many transformations still fail, largely because the organization misses a critical step: transforming their culture and the way people communicate. Agile Conversations brings a practical, step-by-step guide to using the human power of conversation to build effective, high-performing teams to achieve truly Agile results. Consultants Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick show readers how to utilize the Five Conversations to help teams build trust, alleviate fear, answer the “whys,” define commitments, and hold everyone accountable.These five conversations give teams everything they need to reach peak performance, and they are exactly what’s missing from too many teams today. Stop focusing on processes and practices that leave your organization stuck with culture-less rituals. Instead, unleash the unique human power of conversation.

The fastest growing and most competitive organizations in the world have no bureaucracies, no bosses, and no bullshit. The tomato sauce in your pantry. The raincoat in your closet. The smart TV hanging in your living room. What do all of these products have in common? Chances are they were created by organizations where colleagues self-allocate into teams based on intrinsic motivation. Where individuals self-manage their commitments to each other without the coercion of managers. And where teams launch new products and ventures on the market without the control of leaders. These organizations represent a new, radically collaborative breed of corporation. Recently doubling in number and already comprising 8% of corporations around the world, scientists and researchers have discovered that radically collaborative organizations are more competitive on practically every meaningful financial measure. They enjoy higher market share, higher innovation, and higher customer satisfaction than their traditional corporate competitors—and they also enjoy higher engagement, loyalty, and motivation from their employees. In this groundbreaking book, technology thought leader and organizational architect Matt K. Parker breaks down the counterintuitive principles and practices that radically collaborative organizations thrive on. By combining the latest insights from organizational science, sociology, and psychology, he illuminates four imperatives that all radically collaborative organizations must embrace in order to succeed: team autonomy, managerial devolution, deficiency gratification, and candid vulnerability. Millions of workers around the world are collapsing under the weight of command-and-control culture. The crisis has reached its breaking point. Now is the time to embrace radical change. Discover the revolutionary shift to partnership and equality and the economic superiority that follows with A Radical Enterprise.

Winner of the 2011 Booker Prize and #1 international bestseller, The Sense of an Ending is a masterpiece. The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past, Julian Barnes's award-winning novel is laced with his trademark precision, dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world's most distinguished writers. Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian's life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget. Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks, with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky. And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to upset all your vaunted truths?

This guide shows readers how to transform a traditional organization into an evolutionary one with a framework and mindset that offer a new way of leading and approaching change. Now more than ever, society is demanding change, and organizations are being asked to shift into more conscious and agile business practices. Yet, most of what people believe about leadership, effective workplaces, and how to create lasting change is either incomplete or outright incorrect. And even if the desire to change is there, understanding of how to achieve it is elusive. This book holds the key. It introduces the Shift Evolutionary Leadership Framework (SELF), which helps leaders create the understanding and application needed to evolve high performance. At the core of the book are dozens of business patterns that cut across seven dimensions of organizational functioning. The traps of traditional organizations are contrasted with the high-performance practices of evolutionary organizations. Authors Michael Sahota and Audree Tata Sahota explain the steps of leading beyond change—evolving beyond servant leadership to make the inner shift needed to unlock the practical skills and techniques. Whether readers call this shift business agility, Teal Agility, evolutionary, or the future of work, it is possible to create high-performing organizations filled with energized people who are able to surf the waves of change.

Many organizations are facing the uphill battle of modernizing their legacy IT infrastructure. Most have evolved over the years by taking lessons from traditional or legacy manufacturing: creating a production process that puts the emphasis on the process instead of the people performing the tasks, allowing the organization to treat people like resources to try to achieve high-quality outcomes. But those practices and ideas are failing modern IT, where collaboration and creativeness are required to achieve high-performing, high-quality success. Mirco Hering, a thought leader in managing IT within legacy organizations, lays out a roadmap to success for IT managers, showing them how to create the right ecosystem, how to empower people to bring their best to work every day, and how to put the right technology in the driver's seat to propel their organization to success. But just having the right methods and tools will not magically transform an organization; the cultural change that is the hardest is also the most impactful. Using principles from Agile, Lean, and DevOps as well as first-hand examples from the enterprise world, Hering addresses the different challenges that legacy organizations face as they transform into modern IT departments.

The world is in a permanent state of change. We must work in new ways. To change the work we must change how we manage; how we think about management. What got you here won't get you there. There are new ways of managing which are changing business, government, and not-for-profit organisations, big and small. This isn't about leaders, it's about managers. It's not about mystical mind methods, it's about principles to work by. It's about agility, the agile Manager. This book starts your journey. The book has four sections: 1. A set of principles which you as an agile manager must get your head around in order to function in the new world. 2. A set of management practices which follow from those principles. 3. A set of agile work practices that you need to understand and support. 4. Guidance on the journey to new ways of working. . . . Agile is a way of thinking about work. Agile is a thing now, it has become a noun as well as an adjective. Agile thinking is impacting Information Technology, enterprises, government, and society. It may have started in IT but now it is transforming work everywhere, and even how we think. Its impact is far-reaching enough to talk of it as a renaissance in thinking, a refresh or step change that comes only once or twice a century. This is not an exaggeration. . . . It is not just Agile, there is a suite of new ideas transforming work. They all aim for "better value sooner, safer, happier". We simply call them the New Ways of Working, NWoW. This book is about the impact of these new ways on management in the modern enterprise. . . . The new thinking empowers people to be knowledge workers, to design the work and make the decisions. It treats them like they are over 18 and on the same side. Conventional management too often treats people like clerical workers, like plug-compatible wetware, like Human Resources, who can't be trusted, who are evaluated numerically, who are an overhead to be minimised, who need to be told what to do and how to do it. Which is not conducive to satisfaction and mental health. . . . The Agile way is iterative, incremental, experimenting, exploring complex systems. These are displacing the ideas of conventional enterprises: big-bang projects; zero risk; certainty and accuracy; plan once execute perfectly; failure is not an option. Along the way Agile is resurfacing (and standing on the shoulders of) the ideas of Lean, which ironically go back pre-second-world-war; and Agile is drawing on the principles of complex systems and the modern understanding of human behaviour and social constructs. . . . At least as important, though, is New Ways of Managing. Too often, management views the transformation to New Ways as something done to improve the practitioner workforce, not management. This can't be. For an organisation to change, the management must change. This is one of the biggest issues facing organisations moving to agile ways of working. Managers must understand and focus on empowerment, collaboration, agility, and flow. Why focus on management in agile transformation? Because we see it often neglected, and because it is the key. This book is about how to manage in an agile way, not what agile work looks like. Plenty has been written about that. . . . It is our personal offering. We hope you like it and derive value from it. Join our community and tell us how you felt about it.

Suppose you could ask God any question and get an answer. What would it be? Young people all over the world have been asking those questions. So Neale Donald Walsch, author of the internationally bestselling Conversations with God series had another conversation. Conversations with God for Teens is a simple, clear, straight-to-the-point dialogue that answers teens questions about God, money, sex, love, and more. Conversations with God for Teens reads like a rap session at a church youth group, where teenagers discuss everything they ever wanted to know about life but were too afraid to ask God. Walsch acts as the verbal conduit, showing teenagers how easy it is to converse with the divine. When Claudia, age 16, from Perth, Australia, asks, "Why can't I just have sex with everybody? What's the big deal?", the answer God offers her is: "Nothing you do will ever be okay with everybody. 'Everybody' is a large word. The real question is can you have sex and have it be okay with you?" There's no doubt that the casual question-and-answer format will help make God feel welcoming and accessible to teens. Conversations with God for Teens is the perfect gift purchase for parents, grandparents, and anyone else who wants to provide accessible spiritual content for the teen(s) in their lives.