Sublime

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 first is education. It’s important that your team understand the difference between workflows and work execution, and why the hyperactive hive mind is just one workflow among many—and probably not a very good one.

If the acquiree’s processes and values were the reason for its historical success, a better strategy is to let the business stand alone, and for the parent to infuse its resources into the acquired firm’s processes and values. This strategy, in essence, truly constitutes the acquisition of new capabilities.

the need for knowledge-worker support systems that are not programmed by specialists, as they have been in the past, but instead can be dynamically modified by ordinary users in the course of their work.

It is advisable to have a central Ways of Working Center of Enablement (WoW CoE) and coaching. (Note that it’s called a “Center of Enablement,” not a “Center of Excellence.”) The WoW CoE is a central, small, servant leadership function for ways of working. The servant part is that it is there to support colleagues, to help mobilize the organization

plus the information you have about the organization

Boyd refers to the implicit guidance and control pathways within an organization, determined by its culture and existing institutional knowledge and processes, as its repertoire. We have discussed how organizations apply their existing repertoire to disrupt competitors, but in order to improve performance and avoid disruption, we must be constantly

High managerial productivity, I argue, depends largely on choosing to perform tasks that possess high leverage.