Leadership Memo 2021- 7
Has your company gone through transformations? Agile transformation? Digital transformation? How was the experience? Did the transformation stick? What if there is something that would help drive faster and longer lasting (dare I say, permanent!) transformation? Would you want to know what that is?
Agile is a mindset and a habit. It uses some frameworks and practices. However, it is hard to be agile when we need to provide all the answers at the end of each year for the entire following year or when we report in a waterfall manner. It also goes against agile principles when we incentivise people to focus on personal achievements instead of team collaboration and outcome.
So, the way we do budgeting, forecasting, performance assessment, rewards & recognition, and cost control can either enable or hinder agility.
We also need to realise that in order for the company to be nimble and to be able to respond to a rapidly changing environment, the entire organisation needs to be agile. Otherwise, we are only as agile as the least agile department.
By evolving your Finance and HR departments first you can transform your whole organisation by stealth, and therefore at a fraction of the price of traditional transformation programmes. If your agile transformation didn’t start with the Finance and HR departments, put them next on your transformation roadmap. You don’t have to be a finance person or HR professional to affect change, you just need to be a daredevil. I’ll be sharing my experience on how to approach traditional Finance and HR departments in a hierarchical company in an upcoming talk on 22 July. I hope you would join me!
Latest happenings:
1. On 22 July, 11am Pacific time / 19:00 BST, I’ll be giving the talk that I just mentioned, titled ”Daring you to jump onto the Trojan Horse to lead your Transformation to Agility”. Come join me. Register here.
- Recently I started a new group, called SFBABAM (San Francisco Bay Area Business Agility Meetup):
- If you want to know what it means to have an entire company be agile, come join us on 2 August when Joe Justice tells us about “Agile at Tesla”. Register here.
- If you want to know what is possible specifically in the realm of Agile Finance and Agile HR, come join us in late September in the talk called “Beyond Budgeting – Business Agility in practice”. You’ll get to hear what Beyond Budgeting is directly from the Chairman of Beyond Budgeting Roundtable, Bjarte Bogsnes. You’ll also get to hear real life stories on how it’s implemented in a company. Register here.
- If you want to know what it means to have an entire company be agile, come join us on 2 August when Joe Justice tells us about “Agile at Tesla”. Register here.
3. I’m offering a more hands-on workshop into diversity and inclusion in September. We are going to learn what diversity and inclusion truly mean in a workplace. We are also going to understand the effect of having diversity but no inclusion, and the relation to psychological safety. In the end, you’ll be able to apply what you learn immediately in your work, whether it be a fully remote environment, or hybrid or completely in person. Buy tickets here. Since you subscribed to my newsletter, I consider you a friend, so type in “FRIENDS” to get a 10% discount!
