Company Agility

Company as a Product

“One of the things that we do differently is that we treat our company as a product” – Jason Fried – CEO and co-founder of 37signals (on Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz) “Culture is a Product. Every company builds two products, one is the product they build for their customers, and the other …

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Transformation Blues – Fighting the nice-to-have cave of pain with Must Have and Case Studies

My clients are often frustrated that their transformation isn’t taking off despite promising results (e.g., outsized outcomes and speed by leveraging agile ways of working in a strategic initiative).  One path that leaders often take is to follow initial promising results with a mandate to follow new ways of working throughout the organization. This is …

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Situational Leadership: Balancing Involvement and Ownership

Meet Fanny. Fanny is the founder of a successful startup. Fanny comes from a product background She starts to feel overwhelmed. She wants to stay involved but understands that even a superwoman like her has limits. While researching how other leaders are tackling this, someone on the VC Portco Slack channel she’s on shared an HBR …

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Insights from Developing The Code / Operating System For My Business

I’ve been spending some time working on my business recently. It’s time for some dogfooding and drinking my own champagne. I’m spending quite a bit of time in my Lean Canvas (actually pondering several different ones), working on deep Ideal Client Personas (aka Dream Clients, Lighthouse Clients), using my Personal Kanban much more, and thinking …

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“OKRs S&%k, but we don’t know anything better” – Scaling Founder Mode by Fixing OKRs

“OKRs S&%k, but we don’t know anything better” This was a direct quote from a cybersecurity scaleup’s Chief of Staff, but I hear the sentiment way too often from founders, chiefs of staff, COOs, and others in the scaleup ecosystem. I started encountering OKRs when working with scaleups a couple of years ago, helping leaders …

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