When learning from a source, how far back do we go to gain wisdom?
25, 50, 100, 250 or even 2,500 years?
In my book “The Nehemiah Effect,” Ted and I reached back 2,500+ years into the past to share about the worlds first Agile projects:
When I did my MBA in back ‘93 one of my professors shared the story about a group of Ford executives that visited Japan to find out why the Japanese were performing so well.
In the meeting when asked about it, the Japanese executives took out a copy of Henry Ford’s book on production and showed it to the Ford team. Rather embarrassing for Ford’s leadership.
It is amazing to me that one of the sources for Japan’s remarkable results was Henry Ford himself. Ford’s leadership either ignored or forgot about their own founder, W. Edwards Deming, et al, to their own detriment.
Today I found a peer-reviewed article on this very subject and the link to that journal article is here.
It is often overlooked that the seeds of greatness are already present in our own organizations and that those are, sadly, missed (or outright spurned) by the next generations.
In my book “Flow: Get Everyone Moving in the Right Direction and Loving It” Ted and I documented 13 Case Studies (well, actually 14 since SingTel is the featured case study the main body of the book, but it’s also included in the edgecom case study at the end of the book) across all industries (during the past 26 years) where teams successfully applied the principles of the Flow Leadership Framework and delivered some pretty amazing results:
Let’s chat today about how to mine the hidden gems in your own organization…
PS Here are the associated links to this blog post for:
#culture #scrum #agile #pmi #pmp #kanban #lean #flow #scaledagile #transformation #change #transform