Category: Leadership
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The Human Pulse Signals Published Metrics Can’t Capture
What 15 years of ground-level observation reveals about DSO’s real trajectory BOTTOM LINE Published metrics tell one story. Ground-level observation tells another. I’ve watched Bayer’s evolution for over 15 years—close enough to see patterns that analyst reports miss. The signals…
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What Zappos Learned That Bayer Hasn’t—Yet
Precedents, patterns, and why scale changes everything BOTTOM LINE The largest Western self-management experiment before Bayer was Zappos. They had 8 years as “best place to work,” 1,500 employees, and voluntary departures. They still quietly retreated from holacracy. Bayer has…
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The Diagnostic Question Bayer Isn’t Asking
Why DSO might be the right destination reached by the wrong path BOTTOM LINE Bayer’s Dynamic Shared Ownership isn’t wrong. The diagnostic sequence is. Harvard Business School is already writing the case study. The question they’re examining: “Could fewer bosses…
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The Case Study That Didn’t Make the Book
Why Bayer’s DSO transformation deserves its own series BOTTOM LINE When writing Thriving in Turbulence, I had to make difficult cuts. Some material was redundant. Some was tangential. But some was too current, too unfolding, too significant to compress into…
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The Bungy Jump: Why Agile Transformations Fail
Pattern Recognition Across Contexts Thirty years troubleshooting transformations teaches you something valuable: the best explanations come from outside the problem domain. When banking executives struggle with trust deficits, I don’t reference other banks. I talk about bungy jumping. When government…
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The Core Misdiagnosis That Causes Agile Transformations to Fail: Misreading Signals for Agility
In hundreds of organizations I’ve worked with over the past two decades, one pattern repeats itself: well-intentioned efforts to implement agility often fail—not because teams aren’t trying, but because the underlying problem is misdiagnosed. I’ve seen this both as a…
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Agility Requires Holistic Transformation
In the pursuit of agility, many organizations focus heavily on implementing frameworks and processes—scrums, sprints, ceremonies, and fast delivery cycles. Yet, despite these efforts, many Agile transformations falter and fail to deliver the promised adaptability and velocity. Over years of…