Hans Samios' Personal Lean-Agile Knowledge Base

“Someone who achieves a high level of personal mastery lives in a continual learning mode with no end state. They never 'arrive.'” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success - or are they holding you back?” – Clement Stone

“You cannot be smarter than your customer” – Alex Yakma

“You cannot ever have diversity of opinion with yourself” – Dean Leffingwell

“To make Lean work requires a carefully coordinated and synchronized team that is focused on end user value and on continuously improving that value.” – James Coplien

“The key to success in both Lean and Agile is the Lean Secret: Everybody, all together, from early on. This “secret” is what makes the human side of Lean work.” – James Coplien

“If an enterprise consistently doesn’t deliver, it should be viewed as an end-to-end process problem. This end-to-end process, its people, and its processes are called the value stream.” – James Coplien

“Maybe half of software development is about nerd stuff happening at the whiteboard and about typing at the keyboard. But the other half is about people and relationships.” – James Coplien

“Once you start looking for confirmation bias you see it everywhere.” – Michael Feathers

“Organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get. If you don’t like the results you are getting, then you need to change the design of the organization.” – Robert McDonald

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.” – Yogi Berra

“It is better to be roughly right than to be precisely wrong” – John Maynard Keynes

“Be aware that collaboration requires leadership. As the person in charge of the product, you should be open and collaborative but decisive at the same time.” – Roman Pichler

“Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.” – Peter Drucker

“When competitive advantages do not last long, neither do the organizations that execute them.” – Jay R. Galbraith

“All the data must be available to all the parties. In complex organizations, transparency is your friend.” – Jay R. Galbraith

“When a company extends its product differentiation strategy to include chips, sensors, and software in its products, it finds itself in the software business too. Part of the organization now has to move at the pace of the software industry. This pace approaches real-time and requires that cross-functional teams operate under the newsroom model.” – Jay R. Galbraith

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity” – George Patton. Ironically,” Damian McKinney told the Financial Times, “companies are much more focused on what I call ‘command and control’ than their military counterparts.”

“Diversity trumps ability” – Scott Page

“If you don’t get this elementary, but mildly unnatural, mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” – Charlie Munger

“Uncertainty is real. It is the dream of total certainty that is an illusion.” – Byers

“That too is consistent with the EPJ data, which revealed an inverse correlation between fame and accuracy: the more famous an expert was, the less accurate he was.” – Philip E. Tetlock

“Scientists must be able to answer the question “What would convince me I am wrong?” If they can’t, it’s a sign they have grown too attached to their beliefs.” – Philip E. Tetlock

“A defining feature of intuitive judgment is its insensitivity to the quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based.” – Philip E. Tetlock

“I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal.” – Bill Gates

“Foresight isn’t a mysterious gift bestowed at birth. It is the product of particular ways of thinking, of gathering information, of updating beliefs.” – Philip E. Tetlock

“The further out the forecaster tries to look, the more opportunity there is for chaos to flap its butterfly wings and blow away expectations.” – Philip E. Tetlock

“Old forecasts are like old news — soon forgotten — and pundits are almost never asked to reconcile what they said with what actually happened. The one undeniable talent that talking heads have is their skill at telling a compelling story with conviction, and that is enough.” – Philip E. Tetlock

“That was the clever way reporters wrote articles. They put the most important stuff at the top, and then the next most important and then the next. It gave them and their editors huge flexibility” – Clarks Ching

“The scope of the project always expands until it's too big to fit in the time available to deliver it.” – Clarks Ching

“Forecasts, by definition, will sometimes be right and will sometimes be wrong; otherwise we'd call them facts.” – Clarks Ching

“That was how we motivated people: by keeping the pressure on. It didn't actually work, because we almost always delivered late anyway, but I hated to think how late we'd deliver if we took the pressure off.” – Clarks Ching

“What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.” -– Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems” – Nassim Taleb

“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.” – Hofstadter's Law

“If you think Scrum (/ agile / SAFe) is easy, just try it” – Unknown

“Simple, not easy. There's a difference.” – Ron Jeffries

“PowerPoint animation should be a controlled substance in our company” – Dean Leffingwell

“Bury the word rollout in a place where it can never be found again. When you say 'rollout,' the organization probably hears 'roll over,' and probably for good reasons.” – Bjarte Bogsnes on a project approach - just do continuous change.

“People don't resist change. They resist being changed.” – Peter M. Senge

“If you want something you never had, you must be willing to do something you've never done.” – Thomas Jefferson

“You can't get rid of command and control through command and control.” – Bjarte Bogsnes

“We need to foster a cost-conscious culture where frugality saturates every decision made.” – Bjarte Bogsnes

“Cost budgets are definitely much easier, if that is the goal. But it isn't! The goal is an optimal use of scarce resources, and we need something much more effective than the annual, preallocated, and detailed cost budget.” – Bjarte Bogsnes

“Strategy is about making choices. Those who never say no do not have a strategy.” – Bjarte Bogsnes

“Those who only love money will seldom succeed.” – Odd Reitan, one of the richest people in Norway

“It seems to me to be important to distinguish a good idea from poor implementations of it” – Ron Jeffries

“Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex, intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple, stupid behavior.” – Dee Hock

“The more details and decimal places we churn out in our plans and budgets, the more control we believe we have” – Bjarte Bogsnes note that the same could be said for detailed upfront planning in general

“The main question for management is not how to motivate, but rather how management can be deterred from diminishing or even destroying motivation.” – David Sirota