Category: Leadership

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • From Weather Report to Navigation System

    VUCA is dead. Long live BANI. Kevin Kruse’s recent Forbes piece declares the shift complete. Jamais Cascio’s BANI framework – Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible – better captures the fractured reality leaders face. Kruse is right. VUCA assumed volatility had rhythm.…

  • BANI Is Right. It’s Also Not Enough.

    Kevin Kruse’s recent Forbes piece declares VUCA dead. BANI is the new lens. He’s not wrong. Kruse articulates it sharply: VUCA assumed volatility had rhythm, uncertainty could be waited out, and complexity followed patterns. Those assumptions no longer hold. Today’s…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Indonesian Throughflow: Where a Metric Found Its Name

    My wife and I don’t do package holidays. We prefer the unpredictable, where adaptability isn’t optional, it’s essential. Indonesia keeps drawing us back. On a 2016 trip, we set sail from Flores on a traditional fishing boat in the early…