Agile Culture, The: Leading through Trust and Ownership / Edition 1

by Pollyanna Pixton, Paul Gibson, Niel Nickolaisen

Overview

Build Agile Cultures That Unleash Passion, Innovation, and Performance

What do you want? Delighted customers. How do you get them? By rapidly delivering innovative, exciting products and services your customers will love to use. How do you do this? By uniting talented people around shared ideas and purpose, trusting them, helping them take ownership, and getting out of their way. It sounds easy—but you know it isn’t. To make it happen, you must create an agile culture: one that’s open to change and can respond quickly to whatever your customers need and desire. The Agile Culture gives you proven models, pragmatic tools, and handy worksheets for doing just that. Building on their experience helping hundreds of companies, three world-class experts help you align and unleash the talents of everyone in your organization. Step by step, you’ll learn how to move toward a culture of trust, in which everyone knows, owns, and improves the results. You’ll learn practical ways to refocus on differentiators and value, resurrect energy and innovation, deal more honestly with ambiguity and risk, and overcome resistance, no matter where it comes from. This text will help you go beyond buzzwords to transform the way you deliver software—so you can delight customers, colleagues, and executives.

Coverage includes

• Creating cultures of trust and ownership, in which individuals, teams, and organizations can do amazing things

• Assessing where you stand, so you can move toward higher levels of performance, innovation, and motivation

• Leading as an enabler, not a controller

• Rebuilding trust where it’s been lost—or building it where it never existed

• Clarifying quickly the design goals of any project, product, or process

• Using iteration to reduce risk and make commitments you can keep

• Managing uncooperative people (and processes)

• Selecting metrics that focus on business value, foster trust, and don’t compromise ownership

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780321940148
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	02/27/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Pollyanna Pixton, an internationally recognized expert on collaborative leadership, is president of Accelinnova, a firm providing proven tools for leading transformations. Pollyanna led development of the Swiss electronic stock exchange.

Paul Gibson spent more than thirty years developing products for IBM. For four years, he helped lead, guide, train, and transform IBM software teams worldwide in collaborative, agile, and lean approaches. He is a lifetime British Computer Society Fellow.

Niel Nickolaisen is the chief technology officer at O.C. Tanner. Niel has spent his career finding rapid, pragmatic ways to improve processes, teams, and results. He is passionate about transforming IT and leadership, and speaks about, writes about, and trains others how to do this.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: Unleashing Talent
• Chapter 2: Trust and Ownership
• Chapter 3: Building Trust and Ownership
• Chapter 4: Trust Tools
• Chapter 5: Ownership Tools
• Chapter 6: Business Alignment Tools
• Chapter 7: Dealing Honestly with Ambiguity
• Chapter 8: Tools to Deal with Walls
• Chapter 9: Metrics
• Chapter 10: Case Study
• Appendix A: Quick Reference Guide
• Appendix B: Trust-Ownership Assessment
• Appendix C: Collaboration Process
• Appendix D: Collaborating with Non-Collaborators Worksheet
• About the Authors
• Index

Editorial Reviews

This is the Agile book I’ve been waiting for. Enough with the rituals of process. Let’s get into

what really matters–creating the culture that teams need to thrive.”

—Marty Cagan, founding partner, The Silicon Valley Product Group

“A book full of practical tools and real-life stories–a great resource for every leader involved

in a serious Agile transformation.”

—Hendrik Esser, director of portfolio and technology management, Ericsson

“ ‘What is culture? How do we create a culture? What are our cultural problems?’ These

questions can have lofty, philosophical, theoretical answers that sound profound. Unfortunately,

profundity rarely gets the job done. The authors have once again broken an important

topic into easily understood parts. Not only do they make the questions understandable, they

provide specific, actionable techniques for answering the questions and addressing the challenges.

This book is as much a how-to as it is a what-is-it and a why-do-I-care book. Everybody

who is in a leadership role, or deals with people in leadership roles (that’d be just about

everyone, right?) should read this.”

—Steven “Doc” List, vice president of learning, Santeon Group

“The content is phenomenal! Just an incredible distillation of years of experience.”

—Christine DelPrete, senior director of technology, Amirsys, Inc.

From the Publisher