“What we want is not necessarily the lowest possible cost level,” he says. “What we want is the optimal cost level, the

Some takeaways: Work in small teams, create fast feedback cycles, reduce requirements-in-process, improve security hygiene, deliver small pieces of work frequently.

innovation. An enterprise must not only create its future conditions of success but also must undo its previous ones.

My job is not to be right or to know more than any employee. It’s to help an employee design a data-driven approach to assessing new ideas and to develop intuition, judgment, and market intimacy skills. This doesn’t mean encouraging a free-for-all where anyone can do what they want—it means building accountability for good decision making based on

IT investments made to cultivate new growth opportunities, for example, will be hard to fund because they’ll never seem to have as good a business case as those that increase profit in existing business lines.

And the change to tomorrow is not accretive—to morph into the company it’ll be tomorrow, it will need to undo some of the doing it did yesterday, not just add more doing.

The digital transformation requires that the enterprise embrace nimbleness as a daily dance move.

Jim Highsmith is on target when he says, “Productivity measures in general make little sense in knowledge work.”13 Designing good software and infrastructure, solving business problems, and creating IT strategies are knowledge work.

The task of CAS leaders isn’t to issue orders, but to put in place conditions that will cause independent actors within it to choose behaviors that will lead to the right outcomes.11 The enterprise leadership team sets the vision that, in effect, defines what delivering business value will mean.¶