Scaling Leadership Quotes

A year of intense exercise and watching what you eat will likely change the trajectory of your life physically. You will melt away fat, tone up muscle, feel better, and change your habits, likely for life. But only ten days of that exercise program won’t move the needle on the scale. To create big-time success you have to stay focused and stay intense over an extended period of time.

Courage is contagious. To scale daring leadership and build courage in teams and organizations, we have to cultivate a culture in which brave work, tough conversations, and whole hearts are the expectation, and armor is not necessary or rewarded.

Alignment is a force multiplier.

Scale the heights of your career and break that glass ceiling, but do it very quietly and gingerly, and be sure to make a man think he did it for you.

What do the people closest to you value? Make a list of the most important people in your life-from home, work, church, hobbies, and so on. After making the list, write what each person values most. Then rate yourself on a scale of 1 (poorly) to 10 (excellently) on how well you relate to that person's values. If you can't articulate what someone values or you score lower than an 8 in relating to that person, spend more time with him or her to improve.

Your eternal destiny is not cosmic retirement; it is to be part of a tremendously creative project, under unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast scale, with ever-increasing cycles of fruitfulness and enjoyment — that is the prophetic vision which ‘eye has not seen and ear has not heard.’

But for those that have not already attained mastery, structure and doctrine are needed because formlessness is useless to the beginner.

good piece of written communication is the most effective means of broadcasting ideas and scaling yourself.

The masses of China's peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie wish to take an active part in the revolutionary war and to carry it to complete victory. They are the main forces in the revolutionary war, but, being small-scale producers, they are limited in their political outlook (and some of the unemployed masses have anarchist views), so that they are unable to give correct leadership in the war.

Tomorrow’s leaders will be brave enough to scale the dangerous peaks of an increasingly competitive and ethically challenging mountain range. They will drive the problematic conversations that illuminate the valleys in between. T

Elend smiled, recognizing the reference. Trentison's Supplying in Scale. A few years earlier, he would have agreed with Yomen, and the two would probably have spent the afternoon discussing the philosophy of leadership in Yomen's palace. However, Elend had learned things in the last few years that he simply hadn't been able to get form his studies.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way and wish I had access to the information in this book back then. Common traps were stepped in—like trying a top-down mandate to adopt Agile, thinking it was one size fits all, not focusing on measurement (or the right things to measure), leadership behavior not changing, and treating the transformation like a program instead of creating a learning organization (never done).

Being a leader doesn’t mean you have people reporting to you on an organizational chart—leadership is about inspiring and motivating those around you. A good leader affects a team’s ability to deliver code, architect good systems, and apply Lean principles to how the team manages its work and develops products. All of these have a measurable impact on an organization’s profitability, productivity, and market share.

On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford more than doubled the minimum wage for many of his employees by introducing a $5 a day minimum pay scale for employees of the Ford Motor Company. On that same day, Ford began offering profit sharing to his employees and reduced shifts from nine hours to eight. Ford’s treasurer at the time, James Couzens, explained these bold leadership moves by saying, “It is our belief that social justice begins at home. We want those who have helped us to produce this

The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place. Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.

It is too soon to say when or how this era will end or what will succeed it. But what is clear is that a good many of the trends are worrisome. If, for example, a Sino-American cold war materializes, it is quite possible this era may come to be known as the inter–Cold War era, one bookended by the U.S.-Soviet Cold War and one between the United States and China. Such an outcome would result in lower rates of economic growth for both because trade and investment would inevitably be curtailed. It would also reduce the potential for cooperation on regional and global issues. If the liberal world order is sustained and strengthened with the United States resuming a leading role, this could continue to be an era largely characterized by stability, prosperity, and freedom. It is possible, though, that the United States will choose to largely abandon its leading role in the world. In this case, we could in principle see an era of Chinese primacy, but given China’s character, internal constraints, and the nature and scale of the domestic challenges it faces, this is improbable. More likely is that this will turn out to be an era of deterioration, one in which no country or group of countries exercises effective global leadership. In that case, the future would be one of accelerating global disorder.

Under this scenario, in sum, we would collectively stumble our way toward a fragmented, parochial, Big Brotherish kind of information system “characterized by supervision, regulation, constraint, and control.” Moreover, given his view of the world in 1979, Lick had to rate this possibility as far more likely than his optimistic projection. An integrated, open, universally accessible Multinet wouldn’t just happen on its own, he pointed out. It would require cooperation and effort on a time scale of decades, “a long, hard process of deliberate study, experiment, analysis, and development.” That process, in turn, could be sustained only by the forging of a collective vision, some rough consensus on the part of thousands or maybe even millions of people that an open electronic commons was worth having. And that, wrote Lick, would require leadership.

The Soviet collapse in 1989 was even more peaceful, despite the eruption of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Never before has such a mighty empire disappeared so swiftly and so quietly. The Soviet Empire of 1989 had suffered no military defeat except in Afghanistan, no external invasions, no rebellions, nor even large-scale Martin Luther King-style campaigns of civil disobedience. The Soviets still had millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of tanks and aeroplanes, and enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the whole of humankind several times over. The Red Army and the other Warsaw Pact armies remained loyal. Had the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, given the order, the Red Army would have opened fire on the subjugated masses. Yet the Soviet elite, and the Communist regimes through most of eastern Europe (Romania and Serbia were the exceptions), chose not to use even a tiny fraction of this military power. When its members realised that Communism was bankrupt, they renounced force, admitted their failure, packed their suitcases and went home. Gorbachev and his colleagues gave up without a struggle not only the Soviet conquests of World War Two, but also the much older tsarist conquests in the Baltic, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It is chilling to contemplate what might have happened if Gorbachev had behaved like the Serbian leadership – or like the French in Algeria.

What is it like to be made vice-president? On one level, it's a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world. It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising thins and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories,farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I'm misremembering) several empty plots of land.... It was like being given what was almost the nation's highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself.

During the nineteenth century, corps commander was the highest level of command to still require skills of an operator for success. A corps commander was still able to see a problem develop and to dispatch soldiers or artillery to solve it on the spot. But at the army level of command the dynamics were for the first time different. The army commander was much more distant from the battle and consequently had no ability to act immediately or to control soldiers he could not see. The distance of the army commander from the action slowed responses to orders and created friction such that the commander was obliged to make decisions before the enemy’s actions were observed. Civil War army commanders were now suddenly required to exhibit a different set of skills. For the first time, they had to think in time and to command the formation by inculcating their intent in the minds of subordinates with whom they could not communicate directly. Very few of the generals were able to make the transition from direct to indirect leadership, particularly in the heat of combat. Most were very talented men who simply were never given the opportunity to learn to lead indirectly. Some, like Generals Meade and Burnside, found themselves forced to make the transition in the midst of battle. General Lee succeeded in part because, as military advisor to Jefferson Davis, he had been able to watch the war firsthand and to form his leadership style before he took command. General Grant was particularly fortunate to have the luck of learning his craft in the Western theater, where the press and the politicians were more distant, and their absence allowed him more time to learn from his mistakes. From the battle of Shiloh to that of Vicksburg, Grant as largely left alone to learn the art of indirect leadership through trial and error and periodic failure without getting fired for his mistakes. The implications of this phase of military history for the future development of close-combat leaders are at once simple, and self-evident. As the battlefield of the future expands and the battle becomes more chaotic and complex, the line that divides the indirect leader from the direct leader will continue to shift lower down the levels of command. The circumstances of future wars will demand that much younger and less experienced officers be able to practice indirect command. The space that held two Civil War armies of 200,000 men in 1863 would have been controlled by fewer than 1,000 in Desert Storm, and it may well be only a company or platoon position occupied by fewer than 100 soldiers in a decade or two. This means younger commanders will have to command soldiers they cannot see and make decisions without the senior leader’s hand directly on their shoulders. Distance between all the elements that provide support, such as fires and logistics, will demand that young commanders develop the skill to anticipate and think in time. Tomorrow’s tacticians will have to think at the operational level of war. They will have to make the transition from “doers” to thinkers, from commanders who react to what they see to leaders who anticipate what they will see. To do all this to the exacting standard imposed by future wars, the new leaders must learn the art of commanding by intent very early in their stewardship. The concept of “intent” forms the very essence of decentralized command.

As a ground-combat force approaches the deadly zone and moves within range of the enemy’s rifles, mortars, and machine guns, the dynamics of war become more art than science. Intangibles such as training, confidence, leadership, and cohesion provide more secure mantle of protection than the possession of superior equipment.” There is as much folklore as science in the accounts of maneuver units that do exceptionally well in close combat. Empirical and anecdotal evidence gathered from combat studies of the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam has shown conclusively that elite maneuver units, carefully selected and trained, not only perform better in combat but do so with many fewer casualties from all sources of combat incapacitation (for example, from disease and combat fatigue). Such units fight so effectively because they are composed of soldiers of exceptionally quality – better trained and better led as well as coalesced through long-term association that builds familiarity and mutual trust. The difference between carefully trained and led units and those of lesser quality is dramatic.

There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea’s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has slowed the introduction of professional managers in situations where, in contrast to small-scale Chinese businesses, they are desperately needed. Further, the relatively low-trust character of Korean culture does not allow Korean chaebol to exploit the same economies of scale and scope in their network organization as do the Japanese keiretsu. That is, the chaebol resembles a traditional American conglomerate more than a keiretsu network: it is burdened with a headquarters staff and a centralized decision-making apparatus for the chaebol as a whole. In the early days of Korean industrialization, there may have been some economic rationale to horizontal expansion of the chaebol into unfamiliar lines of business, since this was a means of bringing modern management techniques to a traditional economy. But as the economy matured, the logic behind linking companies in unrelated businesses with no obvious synergies became increasingly questionable. The chaebol’s scale may have given them certain advantages in raising capital and in cross-subsidizing businesses, but one would have to ask whether this represented a net advantage to the Korean economy once the agency and other costs of a centralized organization were deducted from the balance. (In any event, the bulk of chaebol financing has come from the government at administered interest rates.) Chaebol linkages may actually serve to hold back the more competitive member companies by embroiling them in the affairs of slow-growing partners. For example, of all the varied members of the Samsung conglomerate, only Samsung Electronics is a truly powerful global player. Yet that company has been caught up for several years in the group-wide management reorganization that began with the passing of the conglomerate’s leadership from Samsung’s founder to his son in the late 1980s.72 A different class of problems lies in the political and social realms. Wealth is considerably more concentrated in Korea than in Taiwan, and the tensions caused by disparities in wealth are evident in the uneasy history of Korean labor relations. While aggregate growth in the two countries has been similar over the past four decades, the average Taiwanese worker has a higher standard of living than his Korean counterpart. Government officials were not oblivious to the Taiwanese example, and beginning in about 1981 they began to reverse somewhat their previous emphasis on large-scale companies by reducing their subsidies and redirecting them to small- and medium-sized businesses. By this time, however, large corporations had become so entrenched in their market sectors that they became very difficult to dislodge. The culture itself, which might have preferred small family businesses if left to its own devices, had begun to change in subtle ways; as in Japan, a glamour now attached to working in the large business sector, guaranteed it a continuing inflow of Korea’s best and brightest young people.73

Your eternal destiny is not cosmic retirement; it is to be part of a tremendously creative project, under unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast scale, with ever-increasing cycles of fruitfulness and enjoyment — that is the prophetic vision which ‘eye has not seen and ear has not heard.’ ” Huh?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Outcomes. We start with the functions and processes driving the business, then push for the company to set goals, delineate measurable Brand Promises, and pick Critical Numbers on the One-Page Strategic Plan, including KPIs for both the People and Process sides of the business so the leadership team has a balanced view of performance.

the most serious barrier is to be found in organizational culture, leadership, and strategy.

When you are scaling a sales team, the to-do list is endless. Hiring, training, coaching, pipeline reviews, forecasting, enterprise deal support, leadership development, and cross-functional communication are all part of the day-to-day.

Mission Command embraces a conception of leadership which unsentimentally places human beings at its center. It crucially depends on factors which do not appear on the balance sheet of an organization: the willingness of people to accept responsibility; the readiness of their superiors to back up their decisions; the tolerance of mistakes made in good faith. Designed for an external environment which is unpredictable and hostile, it builds on an internal environment which is predictable and supportive. At its heart is a network of trust binding people together up, down, and across a hierarchy. Achieving and maintaining that requires constant work.15

It is my experience and from research, that law enforcement professionals all too often needlessly rush, using dynamic responses, in circumstances where a non-dynamic (scaled) response would clearly better our position of advantage. We have to reconsider the way we do things in an effort to keep ourselves and those we protect, safer when responding to situations. If an individual is no longer in position to harm others then the conditions requiring high risk intervention has changed and a more scaled, cautious solution should be pursued.

The leadership team would then spend most of their days walking the floor trying to understand where we were struggling and why. This is a new role for most executives and one we encourage executives to embrace if this process is going to be successful. We

Leadership, true leadership, is not the bastion of those who sit at the top. It is the responsibility of anyone who belongs to the group. Though those with formal rank may have authority to work at greater scale, each of us has a responsibility to keep the Circle of Safety strong. We must all start today to do little things for the good of others … one day at a time.

People are innately prepared to act as members of tribes, but culture tells us how to recognize who belongs to our tribes, what schedules of aid, praise, and punishment are due to tribal fellows, and how the tribe is to deal with other tribes — allies, enemies, and clients. […] Contemporary human societies differ drastically from the societies in which our social instincts evolved. Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies were likely comparatively small, egalitarian, and lacking in powerful institutionalized leadership. […] To evolve largescale, complex social systems, cultural evolutionary processes, driven by cultural group selection, takes advantage of whatever support these instincts offer. […] cultural evolution must cope with a psychology evolved for life in quite different sorts of societies. Appropriate larger scale institutions must regulate the constant pressure from smaller-groups (coalitions, cabals, cliques), to subvert the large-group favoring rules. To do this cultural evolution often makes use of “work arounds” — mobilizing tribal instincts for new purposes. For example, large national and international (e.g. great religions) institutions develop ideologies of symbolically marked inclusion that often fairly successfully engage the tribal instincts on a much larger scale. Military and religious organizations (e.g., Catholic Church), for example, dress recruits in identical clothing (and haircuts) loaded with symbolic markings, and then subdivide them into small groups with whom they eat and engage in long-term repeated interaction. Such work-arounds are often awkward compromises […] Complex societies are, in effect, grand natural social-psychological experiments that stringently test the limits of our innate dispositions to cooperate.

The key to affording higher wages (we’re talking frontline employees, not senior leadership) is a lower total wage cost as a percent of revenue. You have to remain competitive, and the best companies know that one great person can replace three good ones. Through rigorous selection (i.e., Topgrading), they get the absolute best talent in the door, pay employees above-market rates, and then invest heavily in training and development to make them more productive.

YOUR SENSE OF IDENTITY WILL HELP DETERMINE YOUR SCALE OF INFLUENCE. IGNORE IT AT YOUR OWN PERIL.

They knew it on November 9 at 7:00 p.m. when they were planning on how to rebuild the party from the disaster of nominating a know-nothing racist for president, and they knew it at midnight, when they were all frantically calling the oddballs and kooks Trump had assembled into a campaign to lavishly praise their brilliance. The Republican Party stood by a candidate who ran on a religious test to enter the United States. They knew it was unconstitutional and indecent, but they were silent. All through 2016, I had conversations with what passed for leadership in the Republican Party on the need to stand up to Trump. Most of their responses went like this: “Trump is a disaster and a disgrace. But we have to let him lose on his own. If we, the establishment, put our thumbs on the scale, when he loses it will be our fault and not the fault of his racism, the alt-right, and those idiots at Breitbart. We will have elected Hillary Clinton. We have to let him lose and rebuild.

My leader or manager: (Vision) ​–​Has a clear understanding of where we are going. ​–​Has a clear sense of where he/she wants our team to be in five years. ​–​Has a clear idea of where the organization is going. (Inspirational communication) ​–​Says things that make employees proud to be a part of this organization. ​–​Says positive things about the work unit. ​–​Encourages people to see changing environments as situations full of opportunities. (Intellectual stimulation) ​–​Challenges me to think about old problems in new ways. ​–​Has ideas that have forced me to rethink some things that I have never questioned before. ​–​Has challenged me to rethink some of my basic assumptions about my work. (Supportive leadership) ​–​Considers my personal feelings before acting. ​–​Behaves in a manner which is thoughtful of my personal needs. ​–​Sees that the interests of employees are given due consideration. (Personal recognition) ​–​Commends me when I do a better than average job. ​–​Acknowledges improvement in my quality of work. ​–​Personally compliments me when I do outstanding work.

Yet despite all the efforts of the Nazi leadership, exhaustion and war fatigue were clearly taking hold of the German people. On the third anniversary of the start of the war in early September 1942, Security Service reports recorded an alarming phenomenon: “The increasing shortages of necessities; three years of constraints in all areas of daily life; more and more fierce, large-scale enemy attacks from the air; and fear for the lives of relatives at the front…are all factors exerting an increasing influence on the mood of broad sections of the population and causing increasingly frequent wishes that the war would end.”119 After the Stalingrad catastrophe at the latest, fewer and fewer Germans believed in slogans about imminent “final victory.

grow double digits each year for decades. To scale any business you must first create a reliable system for all functions—manufacturing, sales, promotion, talent acquisition, innovation, even leadership from the CEO.

The key to scaling your culture lies in leadership. Specifically, you must hire leaders who embody your culture and train them to lead in a way that aligns with your culture and values.

The ideology of leadership and management that underpins large-scale human organizations today is as limiting to organizational success as the ideology of feudalism was limiting to economic success in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

EMBODY THE VALUES To live in a fashion consistent with your stated values. The principle behind the practice: More of leadership is caught rather than taught. In other words, people watch the leader and learn from his or her example. Single-word focus: Credibility Key Questions • What values or beliefs do I want to drive the behavior of my organization? • How can I communicate these values? • Which of these values do I most consistently model? • Which of these values do I need to work on? • What are my actions communicating? Caution: If the leader doesn’t embody the values, the trust of his or her followers will erode, and ultimately the leader will forfeit the opportunity to lead. Food for Thought • What have I learned about leadership during this journey? • Why does it matter? • What do I do with all that I’ve learned? • What am I willing to do today to improve my leadership? • What one thing can I put into practice this week? • Who can I ask to help me? THE ULTIMATE QUESTION Am I a serving leader or a self-serving leader? Self-Assessment Are You a Serving Leader? Rate each statement using the following scale: 5 = Completely agree 4 = Partially agree 3 = Neither agree nor disagree

A fighting force cannot be reduced to its order of battle any more than a ship’s value can be reduced to the number of guns she carries or the shaft horsepower her turbines can generate. A vessel draws life from the spirit of her crew, which derives in large part from the leadership qualities of her chiefs and officers. Morale defies quantification--and yet it weighs significantly on the ultimate lethality of the tools of war. A ship’s effectiveness is the product of thousands of bonds that develop between individual officers and crew. The bonds form and break in a chain reaction, the power of which is determined by drill, by relationships, by fortitude, faith, and values. Task force commanders can be only abstractly aware of these uncountable qualities as they exist on the particular ships under their command. The officers of the ships themselves see these qualities more clearly but still can only guess how the chemical reactions will coalesce when the real shooting starts and men begin to die. And so orders of battle are drawn up to focus on the tangibles: speed, displacement, armament, and sensors. On that score Taffy 3 scarcely even registered on the scale of force that Takeo Kurita brought against them.

By 1928, with only $20 million in partnership capital and either sole or joint control over funds worth $500 million, this created a devastating level of exposure on the eve of the October 1929 stock market crash. John Kenneth Galbraith used phrases such as “gargantuan insanity” and “madness … on a heroic scale” to describe GTSC’s strategy.21 When the crash came, GTSC shares fell from their high of $326 to less than $2 per share. The ensuing debacle and damage to Goldman’s reputation, leadership, and clients caused Goldman to stay away from the asset management business.

(Inspirational communication) ​–​Says things that make employees proud to be a part of this organization. ​–​Says positive things about the work unit. ​–​Encourages people to see changing environments as situations full of opportunities. (Intellectual stimulation) ​–​Challenges me to think about old problems in new ways. ​–​Has ideas that have forced me to rethink some things that I have never questioned before. ​–​Has challenged me to rethink some of my basic assumptions about my work. (Supportive leadership)

When you decide to take a step to the right, you expect all parts of your body to work in unity to take that step. Actually, you do not even expect it; it is just as natural a feature of our existence as drawing breath. You would be dumbfounded if not outright terrorized if your left leg suddenly moved in the opposite direction. While this is an everyday occurrence in the corporate world, with organizations aimlessly ambling about like zombies, the problem of moving in unity becomes even more urgent if we truly aim to achieve business agility. It is only when we can harmonize the decentralized decision making in the teams with the intent of senior leadership that we can achieve real business agility. Imagine your organization moved like your body: If there is an unexpected noise in your environment, your whole body turns in that direction to assess the situation and address possible threats that might come towards you. How great would it be if your organization did the same? Flexibly reacting to changes in the environment without friction, discussion, or delay, just a seamless and natural response — would that not be true agility?

Vision. Has a clear understanding of where the organization is going and where it should be in five years. Inspirational communication. Communicates in a way that inspires and motivates, even in an uncertain or changing environment. Intellectual stimulation. Challenges followers to think about problems in new ways. Supportive leadership. Demonstrates care and consideration of followers’ personal needs and feelings. Personal recognition. Praises and acknowledges achievement of goals and improvements in work quality; personally compliments others when they do outstanding work.

Dheeraj explained to me that when leaders don’t have the skills to lean into vulnerability, they’re not able to successfully hold the tension of the paradoxes that are inherent in entrepreneurship. His examples of the paradoxes that elicit vulnerability in leaders align with what we heard from the research participants: Optimism and paranoia Letting chaos reign (the act of building) and reining in chaos (the act of scaling) Big heart and tough decision making Humility and fierce resolve Velocity and quality when building new things Left brain and right brain Simplicity and choice Thinking global, acting local Ambition and attention to detail Thinking big but starting small Short-term and long-term Marathons and sprints, or marathon of sprints in business-building Dheeraj told me, “Leaders must learn the skills to hold these tensions and get adept at “balancing on the ‘tightrope’ of life. Ultimately, leadership is the ability to thrive in the ambiguity of paradoxes and opposites

With investment levels so high and already being misallocated on a massive scale, the central government might have preferred higher consumption. But China’s myriad institutional constraints, which we will discuss in more detail later in the chapter, meant that consumption could not have grown quickly enough except through a surge in household borrowing. Unsurprisingly, given what the Chinese leadership had just seen occur in the United States, there was no interest in a similar experience. That is why the government chose to focus on boosting investment. The most straightforward response to the global financial crisis was a massive boost in infrastructure and housing investment to offset the decline in foreign spending. This simultaneously magnified China’s long-standing imbalances while shifting them inward. China was able to sustain growth even as its current account surplus fell at the cost of a nearly unprecedented surge in Chinese indebtedness. Unproductive investments have failed to pay for themselves.2 The danger is that the Chinese government, having reached the limits of its ability to generate rapid growth through debt-funded investment, will once again attempt to shift the costs of its economic model to the rest of the world through trade surpluses and financial outflows. The only way to prevent this is to rebalance the Chinese economy so that household consumption is prioritized over investment. That means reversing all of the existing mechanisms transferring purchasing power from Chinese workers and retirees to companies and the government—reforms at least as dramatic and politically difficult as the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping beginning in 1978. Unfortunately for China, the choices of the past few decades have become politically entrenched. It is easy for an antidemocratic authoritarian regime to suppress workers’ rights and shift spending power from consumers to large companies. Stalin did it, after all. The problem is that years of state-sponsored income concentration creates a potent group of “vested interests”—Premier Li Keqiang’s preferred term—that will fiercely resist any reforms that would shift spending power back to consumers. Any successful adjustment

Here Jannes meets on a regular cadence with his direct reports, where they can quickly see and understand the status of each of his strategic objectives. Four distinct zones are visualized: strategic improvement, performance monitoring, portfolio roadmap, and leadership actions, each with current

Lean-Agile Leadership describes how Lean-Agile leaders drive and sustain organizational change by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential.

Transformational leadership means leaders inspiring and motivating followers to achieve higher performance by appealing to their values and sense of purpose, facilitating wide-scale organizational change. Such leaders encourage their teams to work toward a common goal through their vision, values, communication, example-setting, and their evident caring about their followers’ personal needs.

DevOps Evangelist An expert Consultant who can now evangelise a DevOps solution for an Enterprise. Typical tasks: Scaling DevOps capabilities across Enterprise Change Management Organisation Alignment This is a high-end Consulting role, with a heavy technology bend. At a DevOps Engineer level, it’s mostly about deep technical skills. As you evolve into a solution architect kind of role, along with the technical acumen, it’s also about leadership skills to build consensus/agreements and making a team work together.

improvements in software delivery are possible for every team and in every company, as long as leadership provides consistent support

To achieve cost savings and strategic performance while innovating and taking decisions that will have serious consequences, apply the systems thinking approach and a knowledge-based vision. Have a long-term focus and strategic objectives; acknowledge the complexity of an organization; recognise that scaling-up successful strategy requires (hyper)convergence of business objectives, data analytics, human-factors engineering, information and cyber security, regulatory compliance, cutting edge technologies… Understand the process! Enjoy success!

Leaders have to understand the principles and practices of change leadership and organizational change management. They must become curators, caretakers, and defenders of the new way of working.

Those without a true sense of history fail to see how volatile and transient human leadership is, even on the scale of empires. When viewed from the perspective of a mere lifetime, we tend to see our governmental structures as permanent and unchangeable. This is entirely false. —FAYKAN CORRINO I, first Emperor after the Butlerian Jihad

Unfortunately, the practice of leadership is so misunderstood. It has nothing to do with rank. It has nothing to do with authority. Those things may come with a leadership position—and they may help a leader operate with greater efficiency and at greater scale—but those things do not a leader make. Leadership is not about being in charge; it’s about taking care of those in our charge. It is a distinctly human endeavor. And part of what it takes to advance good leadership is to share the lessons, tools, and ideas that help each of us become the leaders we wish we had.

Tomorrow’s leaders will be brave enough to scale the dangerous peaks of an increasingly competitive and ethically challenging mountain range. They will drive the problematic conversations that illuminate the valleys in between.

After calming himself down, Eric wrote down the following five questions that he would ask each member of his social media team:       1. In the last 12 weeks, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much effort have you put into being great at your job?     2. In the last 12 weeks, on a scale of 1 to 10, how have you done with results at your job?     3. What are the top two or three strengths of this division?     4. What is the number one greatest need for improvement within this division?     5. What is one thing you can do differently that could help make the needed improvement? As

It doesn’t matter how smart you are – you can only accomplish finite with two hands and one brain. To scale heights, you need help from others.

The concept is made even more fascinating when you consider it as a psychological spectrum. Imagine a sliding scale of personalities that range from being an “introvert” to an “extrovert” and placing “ambivert” smack dab in the middle. This linear scale illustrates a continuum of experiences, because these descriptions do not apply to every person at all times. We all have tendencies, preferences, and comfort zones that change according to the people we are surrounded by, the environment we find ourselves in, and our levels of confidence in the moment. Using the scale above, where do you typically fall in the spectrum?

Entering the ministry had always involved sacrifice, but the scale of that sacrifice grew considerably steeper during the 1960s and ’70s. Swiftly rising salaries in every nonclerical career almost certainly depleted the ranks of would-be priests and ministers, depriving the established churches of youthful leadership at precisely the moment when it was needed most. (A representative statistic: the average salary for a married Protestant minister with a graduate degree rose just 11 percent between the 1970s and the 1990s; for a doctor or lawyer, it rose 37 percent.

Leadership, true leadership, is not the bastion of those who sit at the top. It is the responsibility of anyone who belongs to the group. Though those with formal rank may have authority to work at greater scale, each of us has a responsibility to keep the Circle of Safety strong. We must all start today to do little things for the good of others … one day at a time. Let us all be the leaders we wish we had.

Some emerging markets will check all the boxes—strong population growth, growing middle class, verge of investment grade, great leadership, and hunger for capital—and then be missing the one ingredient that enables you to monetize your investment: scale. Without scale, you don’t have liquidity. You have no optionality. In essence, you’re stuck.

When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.” “Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.” “Never limit your ambitions.” “If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.” “Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.” “Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.” “Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.” “When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.” “We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.” “Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!” “Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.” “Raising your voice is not an argument.” “Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.” “Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!” “Be positively the influencer, not the follower.” “Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!” “Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.” “If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.” “Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!” “Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!” “Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!” “Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!” “A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!” “Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!” Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!” “Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth” “Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!” “The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!” “I’m realistically optimistic!” “The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human” “Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!” “Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach” “Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!” “The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.” “Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!” “Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!

When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.” “Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.” “Never limit your ambitions.” “If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.” “Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.” “Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.” “Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.” “When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.” “We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.” “Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!” “Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.” “Raising your voice is not an argument.” “Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.” “Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!” “Be positively the influencer, not the follower.” “Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!” “Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.” “If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.” “Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!” “Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!” “Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!” “Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!” “A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!” “Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!” Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!” “Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth” “Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!” “The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!” “I’m realistically optimistic!” “The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human” “Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!” “Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach” “Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!” “The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.” “Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!” “Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!

The Heart of Daring Leadership 1. You can’t get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability. Embrace the suck. 2. Self-awareness and self-love matter. Who we are is how we lead. 3. Courage is contagious. To scale daring leadership and build courage in teams and organizations, we have to cultivate a culture in which brave work, tough conversations, and whole hearts are the expectation, and armor is not necessary or rewarded.

Alfred Chandler argued that the two main challenges faced by executives are to drive economies of both scale and scope in order to survive and thrive.4 Subsequent work in economics and management showed that a third challenge is equally important: learning—the operating capability to improve and innovate.

The four common archetypes of Staff-plus roles I encountered are: The Tech Lead guides the approach and execution of a particular team. They partner closely with a single manager, but sometimes they partner with two or three managers within a focused area. Some companies also have a Tech Lead Manager role, which is similar to the Tech Lead archetype but exists on the engineering manager ladder and includes people management responsibilities. The Architect is responsible for the direction, quality, and approach within a critical area. They combine in-depth knowledge of technical constraints, user needs, and organization level leadership. The Solver digs deep into arbitrarily complex problems and finds an appropriate path forward. Some focus on a given area for long periods. Others bounce from hotspot to hotspot as guided by organizational leadership. The Right Hand extends an executive’s attention, borrowing their scope and authority to operate particularly complex organizations. They provide additional leadership bandwidth to leaders of large-scale organizations. This taxonomy is more focused on being useful than complete, but so far, I’ve been able to fit every Staff-plus engineer I’ve spoken to into one of these categories. Admittedly, some folks are easier to classify than others.

Aurobindo had no patience with such contrived views. Strength and other martial virtues are by no means un-Hindu and borrowings from the colonial scale of values. It is precisely the colonial view that Hindus are effeminate, passive bystanders when their country was overrun by one invader after another, naturally meek people who stand in need of the virile leadership of the colonizer. The straight fact is that India’s history is replete with martial feats and heroism as much as Britain’s is, and that Hindu literature, likewise, glorifies bravery and victory.

In a crisis like COVID, information is not foresight. It takes exceptionally brave leadership to act decisively, before the full scale of a threat becomes obvious. By the time the situation is evident, it can be too late to avoid a catastrophic outcome.

Letting go of doing the work is tricky, but the manager’s job isn’t doing quality work, it’s building a healthy team that does quality work at scale.

Steve and Karen extend our view beyond the interrelationships of team, management, and leadership practices, beyond the skillful adoption of DevOps, and beyond the breaking down of silos—all necessary, but not sufficient. Here we see the evolution of holistic, end-to-end organizational transformation, fully engaged and fully aligned to enterprise purpose.

At the heart of Lean management is giving employees the necessary time and resources to improve their own work. This means creating a work environment that supports experimentation, failure, and learning, and allows employees to make decisions that affect their jobs. This also means creating space for employees to do new, creative, value-add work during the work week—and not just expecting them to devote extra time after hours.

Some emerging markets will check all the boxes—strong population growth, growing middle class, verge of investment grade, great leadership, and hunger for capital—and then be missing the one ingredient that enables you to monetize your investment: scale. Without scale, you don’t have liquidity. You have no optionality. In essence, you’re stuck. Africa is a great example. I think many countries, such as Botswana, have potential, but the upper and middle classes are too small for me to get involved. Chile is another example. It has the institutions and leadership, but only 17 million people—no scale.

Leadership, true leadership, is not the bastion of those who sit at the top. It is the responsibility of anyone who belongs to the group. Though those with formal rank may have authority to work at greater scale, each of us has a responsibility to keep the Circle of Safety strong.

How organizations deal with failures or accidents is particularly instructive. Pathological organizations look for a “throat to choke”: Investigations aim to find the person or persons “responsible” for the problem, and then punish or blame them. But in complex adaptive systems, accidents are almost never the fault of a single person who saw clearly what was going to happen and then ran toward it or failed to act to prevent it. Rather, accidents typically emerge from a complex interplay of contributing factors. [...] Thus, accident investigations that stop at “human error” are not just bad but dangerous. Human error should, instead, be the start of the investigation. Our goal should be to discover how we could improve information flow so that people have better or more timely information, or to find better tools to help prevent catastrophic failures following apparently mundane operations.

The point of intelligent automation is to enable a company’s scarcest and hardest-to-scale assets—its talented people—to focus on only those tasks that machines cannot do. Strengths in human qualities and abilities such as leadership, creativity, persuasiveness, critical thinking, and intuition will remain the source of the company’s competitive edge, precisely because they are hard to replicate.

The truth is, most entrepreneurs pivot many times before they find their footing. And often, even after they find their footing. And it can feel perilous. You have to steer toward a new opportunity, often before it comes into clear focus. And, equally challenging, you have to turn away from something—specifically, an idea that previously inspired hopes, dreams, and investment of time and money. Human beings don’t let go of old ideas easily. In pivoting, you risk blowback from your co-founders, your staff, your investors, and your users. For those reasons, it can be the single greatest test of your leadership skills.

Part of maintaining that consistent drumbeat is for leadership to behave in a consistent way that reinforces the culture and values of the company. For example, often organizations reward people who achieve results without regard for how they achieved them, rather than asking: Did they do it in a way that’s consistent with our culture and values? This tendency to celebrate and reward the “what” instead of the “how” is one of the ways companies lose their character as they grow. You need a clear vision not only of what you want to achieve but also how you want to achieve it, and you should share that vision, loudly and often—especially if your company has achieved scale and you’re cascading those messages to five thousand, ten thousand, or fifteen-thousand-plus employees. With more people, there is more distance from the leadership—which means you need to pound the drum harder and more often just to be heard.

Leadership at scale—and leadership as you scale—means you’re constantly adapting and evolving. You can’t follow a single style or approach. You’re always leading through transitions. Your company is always changing around you. And this means you’re naturally going to have a very resilient kind of leadership, producing a resilient team and company.

All of this interest in leadership seems very strange to me. Why the obsession with leadership? The focus should be on systems. If we are talking about culture, all leaders tend to distance themselves from their teams and then attempt to change the culture from outside of the culture. I don't think that is going to work. When a system has become so dysfunctional that it generates whistleblowers, it is the leaders that punish these people that are trying in vain to correct the system because the leaders have become overly invested in a flawed agenda or ideology. Brilliance requires effort, observation of the system from as many angles and at as many scales as possible.

7. Our task, as the Minister of Supply rightly reminds us, is indeed formidable when the gigantic scale of German military and aviation equipment is considered. This war is not however a war of masses of men hurling masses of shells at each other. It is by devising new weapons, and above all by scientific leadership, that we shall best cope with the enemy’s superior strength.

If task‐based automation is microscale, straight‐through processing is system scale. The technology takes over the entire process across systems and is designed to require no manual intervention.

Organizations give us the ability to create complex products. They provide the muscle and consistency necessary to get things to market and to back them up. Most important, organizations have the scale to care for large tribes. But organizations don’t have to be factories, not anymore. Factories are easy to outsource. Factories can slow you down. The organizations of the future are filled with smart, fast, flexible people on a mission. The thing is, that requires leadership.

After an entrepreneur has incubated a product in the innovation sandbox, it has to be reintegrated into the parent organization. A larger team eventually will be needed to grow it, commercialize it, and scale it. At first, this team will require the continued leadership of the innovators who worked in the sandbox. In fact, this is a positive part of the process in that it gives the innovators a chance to train new team members in the new style of working that they mastered in the original sandbox.

For established firms, the opportunity to anchor a new initiative with an internal customer can amplify the delusion of leadership. It is a double-edged sword that should be handled with care. On the plus side, an internal customer creates an opportunity to jump-start scale and show activity. The risks, however, are (a) that the internal customer is taken as an unbiased signal of market demand; (b) that the business generated by the internal customer is used as a source of revenue for the venture, rather than leveraged to attract and align early stage partners; and (c) that the artificially low barriers to serve and support the internal customer mask the need to realign the firm’s own internal ecosystem in ways that serve and support external partners and customers

Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership, by Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi, and Drea Zigarmi, to gain more insight into this powerful coaching framework.

In 1909 Fritz Haber, a professor of chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe, succeeded in synthesizing ammonia from its elements (fig. 4.4). He did that by taking nitrogen from the air and hydrogen from reacting glowing coke with water vapor and combining the two elements under high pressure in the presence of a metal (iron) catalyst. His research was supported by BASF, at that time the world’s leader in the production of industrial chemicals, and it was under the leadership of Carl Bosch, one of BASF’s most capable engineers, that Haber’s bench-top demonstration was converted rapidly into a full-scale industrial synthesis (fig. 4.4).

Reducing mediocrity is a slow, difficult, person-by-person process in which the less able learn to identify and trust the more able who will diligently and honestly serve them. It is also a process in which able and honest, serving people prepare themselves to lead and accept the opportunity to lead when offered. Reducing mediocrity in positions of influence by replacing the less qualified with more able and honest serving people is a manageable task with our available resources. It can be done. And I am confident that it will be done on a substantial scale when the people and institutions that have the good of society at heart bring a clearer focus to their efforts and concentrate on the one thing that will turn us about the quickest: excellence in place of mediocrity.

That’s why I think that cultivation, ‘becoming a real human being,’ really is the primary leadership issue of our time, but on a scale never required before. It’s a very old idea that may actually hold the key to a new age of ‘global democracy.

hubris syndrome. This syndrome is characterized by recklessness, an inattention to detail, overwhelming self-confidence and contempt for others; all of which, he observes, “can result in disastrous leadership and cause damage on a large scale.” The syndrome, he continues, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.

Solving the problems of the Middle East and the threat they pose to the world requires a fundamental change in the region’s economic profile.9 The international community would have to make a sizable investment—a Marshall Plan in scale—to bring about change of that magnitude. And that requires American leadership. Even if we cannot afford that right now, we still need a clear economic strategy for the region—a plan for using development aid, trade, and investment to help the region and also serve our interests.

1870.—One of my waking dreams is that the legendary tales about Moses coming up into Inner Ethiopia with Merr his foster-mother, and founding a city which he called in her honour "Meroe," may have a substratum of fact. He was evidently a man of transcendent genius, and we learn from the speech of St. Stephen that "he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds." His deeds must have been well known in Egypt, for "he supposed that his brethren would have understood how that God by His hand would deliver them, but they understood not." His supposition could not be founded on his success in smiting a single Egyptian; he was too great a man to be elated by a single act of prowess, but his success on a large scale in Ethiopia afforded reasonable grounds for believing that his brethren would be proud of their countryman, and disposed to follow his leadership, but they were slaves. The

As an actor, I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters, often solving fictitious problems… I believe that mankind has looked at climate change in that same way — as if it were a fiction, as if pretending that climate change wasn't real would somehow make it go away… To be clear, this is not about just telling people to change their light bulbs or to buy a hybrid car; this disaster has grown beyond the choices that individuals make… None of this is rhetoric, none of it is hysteria — it is a fact... This is now about our industries and our governments around the world taking decisive and large-scale action.

The moral of the story, borne out in the data, is this: improvements in software delivery are possible for every team and in every company, as long as leadership provides consistent support— including time, actions, and resources—demonstrating a true commitment to improvement, and as long as team members commit themselves to the work.

In order to set your team up for success as it scales, it’s important to consider what the core product and design principles for your organization are — and articulate them clearly so everyone in the team understands them and can apply them in their work.

Without cultural change, we are hopeless to change existing results.5 Of all changes, cultural change is the most difficult. It is essentially changing the collective DNA of an entire group of people. To understand how to change culture, it is helpful to know how change works in general. Changing Church Culture Change is extremely difficult. One of the most vivid and striking examples of this painful reality is the inability of heart patients to change even when confronted with grim reality. Roughly six hundred thousand people have a heart bypass each year in the United States. These patients are told they must change. They must change their eating habits, must exercise, and quit smoking and drinking. If they do not, they will die. The case for change is so compelling that they are literally told, “Change or die.”6 Yet despite the clear instructions and painful reality, 90 percent of the patients do not change. Within two years of hearing such brutal facts, they remain the same. Change is that challenging for people. For the vast majority of patients, death is chosen over change. Yet leadership is often about change, about moving a group of people to a new future. Perhaps the most recognized leadership book on leading an organization to change is John Kotter’s Leading Change. And when ministry leaders speak or write about leadership, they often look to the wisdom found in the book of Nehemiah, as it chronicles Nehemiah’s leadership in rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem. Nehemiah led wide-scale change. Nehemiah never read Kotter’s book, and he led well without it. The Lord well equipped Nehemiah for the task of leading God’s people. But it is fascinating to see how Nehemiah’s actions mirror much of what Kotter has observed in leaders who successfully lead change. With a leadership development culture in mind, here are the eight steps for leading change, according to Kotter, and how one can see them in Nehemiah’s leadership. 1. Establish a sense of urgency. Leaders must create dissatisfaction with an ineffective status quo. They must help others develop a sense of angst over the brokenness around them. Nehemiah heard a negative report from Jerusalem, and it crushed him to the point of weeping, fasting, and prayer (Neh. 1:3–4). Sadly, the horrible situation in Jerusalem had become the status quo. The disgrace did not bother the people in the same way that it frustrated Nehemiah. After he arrived in Jerusalem, he walked around and observed the destruction. Before he launched the vision of rebuilding the wall, Nehemiah pointed out to the people that they were in trouble and ruins. He started with urgency, not vision. Without urgency, plans for change do not work. If you assess your culture and find deviant behaviors that reveal some inaccurate theological beliefs, you must create urgency by pointing these out. If you assess your culture and find a lack of leadership development, a sense of urgency must be created. Leadership development is an urgent matter because the mission the Lord has given us is so great.

manipulation through the tactic of mass assignation. Silvia, a CIO for a logistics agency, described the tactic in the following manner. “Behind closed doors I assemble the team and we plan how to best maneuver the multitude of stakeholders we have to influence to get large-scale change done. We create a highly detailed power map that includes their priorities, relationships, likes, dislikes — even their hobbies and favorite foods. This power map file is encrypted and kept only on my personal laptop, which no one may access but me.” Then she explains, “We continuously analyze their communication styles and who they relate to both on and off the team to determine the best person, channel and information to sway them. If they need to meet with Paul on a project, but they dislike Paul but like Mary, for example, we have Mary set up the meeting and Paul just shows up with her. If they like golf, the information we provide them includes golf analogies. If they like seafood, I take them out for lunch at the local oyster bar. I learned to do this when I worked for a consumer products company. This is how we analyzed the relationships between multiple target customers at the same time to determine how to sell more, and it made sense to apply it internally here.” As noted, mass

since nearly every company relies on software, delivery performance is critical to any organization doing business today. And software delivery performance is affected by many factors, including leadership, tools, automation, and a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

The president fundamentally wants to be liked” was Katie Walsh’s analysis. “He just fundamentally needs to be liked so badly that it’s always … everything is a struggle for him.” This translated into a constant need to win something—anything. Equally important, it was essential that he look like a winner. Of course, trying to win without consideration, plan, or clear goals had, in the course of the administration’s first nine months, resulted in almost nothing but losses. At the same time, confounding all political logic, that lack of a plan, that impulsivity, that apparent joie de guerre, had helped create the disruptiveness that seemed to so joyously shatter the status quo for so many. But now, Bannon thought, that novelty was finally wearing off. For Bannon, the Strange-Moore race had been a test of the Trump cult of personality. Certainly Trump continued to believe that people were following him, that he was the movement—and that his support was worth 8 to 10 points in any race. Bannon had decided to test this thesis and to do it as dramatically as possible. All told, the Senate Republican leadership and others spent $ 32 million on Strange’s campaign, while Moore’s campaign spent $ 2 million. Trump, though aware of Strange’s deep polling deficit, had agreed to extend his support in a personal trip. But his appearance in Huntsville, Alabama, on September 22, before a Trump-size crowd, was a political flatliner. It was a full-on Trump speech, ninety minutes of rambling and improvisation—the wall would be built (now it was a see-through wall), Russian interference in the U.S. election was a hoax, he would fire anybody on his cabinet who supported Moore. But, while his base turned out en masse, still drawn to Trump the novelty, his cheerleading for Luther Strange drew at best a muted response. As the crowd became restless, the event threatened to become a hopeless embarrassment. Reading his audience and desperate to find a way out, Trump suddenly threw out a line about Colin Kaepernick taking to his knee while the national anthem played at a National Football League game. The line got a standing ovation. The president thereupon promptly abandoned Luther Strange for the rest of the speech. Likewise, for the next week he continued to whip the NFL. Pay no attention to Strange’s resounding defeat five days after the event in Huntsville. Ignore the size and scale of Trump’s rejection and the Moore-Bannon triumph, with its hint of new disruptions to come. Now Trump had a new topic, and a winning one: the Knee.