Thriving in Turbulence is live on Amazon. Here’s the diagnostic system behind it. Monday morning. Your transformation is three months in. Everyone’s working harder than ever. Standups happen. Retrospectives are religious. You’ve got OKRs, Kanban boards, and detailed roadmaps. Yet delivery is slowing. Dependencies multiply. Your best people look exhausted. Stakeholders escalate to your boss. … Read more
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 60× the scale, a trust deficit, and involuntary layoffs. The precedent doesn’t predict failure—but it … Read more
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 truly drive innovation, or was this an unsustainable gamble?” CIRCA-CLEAR suggests a different question: Is … Read more
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 a paragraph—yet too valuable to discard. Bayer’s Dynamic Shared Ownership experiment fell into the third … Read more
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 teams face decision paralysis, I describe hotel operations from my parents’ business. When retail leaders … Read more
In preparing for the Agile Business Consortium‘s recent Professional Masterclass, I found myself pondering the key case study. Months prior, I’d committed to a bold session title: ‘Decode the Chaos: A Masterclass in Leading with the CIRCA–CLEAR Framework.’ The workshop promise was significant: to equip leaders with the insight to diagnose systemic challenges and shift … Read more