Quick Reads (Under 5 Minutes)

People debate Agile like it’s a machine you plug into a wall that excretes business value. Agile principles and practices are just a part of what you care about: how disciplined your craft, how determined you are in adversity, actually changing based on learning, and how you use time and money. You still have to make something timely and useful. All that still doesn’t guarantee success. Luck and external conditions matter. Relationships, resources, advantages, and access matter. Absent that content, what is the conversation?

After some hard won lessons around participation, equity and buy in, I’ve started asking these six questions before enacting any important leadership decision. Anyone do anything similar? Better?

1. What exactly we doing?
2. How does it relate to an existing priority?
3. Why now?
4. Who’s accountable?
5. Can/Have we consulted with the people affected by the decision?
6. How can people help/stay informed/participate?

Mark Green thank you for helping us through these very circumstances. Reads like a case study.

Concise statement of purpose for C-level leadership and the place of business in society that I aspire to https://lnkd.in/gjQFJ6N

It’s so hard to know which action you take today will achieve the impact you want to create in the future. The Objectives / Measures / Value is an outline for a conversation among leaders and teams to crack into that challenge.

Awesome, Michael! Helping build a better future.

Stride Consulting builds custom software for clients aligned to our purpose and core values. We’re based in NYC and hiring software developers in Charlotte, Denver, and Chicago. https://lnkd.in/eNw6NGf.

Building our leadership team.

I am filled with joy and inspired by a sense of duty as Stride’s new CEO. It’s hard to express how beautiful and rare Stride is https://lnkd.in/gauz-b6 Debbie Madden remains Chairwoman of the board.

Praise to Madelyn Freed and Brian Lam who led a company wide process to refresh our core values culminating in an all hands sociocratic consent round. If you haven’t seen that work before, I hadn’t either. And I’ve tried. Amazing. Thanks also to our mentor Diana Larsen (she/her/hers) Nothing but gratitude to all concerned!

For a company founded with such a human-centric purpose and composed of such thoughtful and hopeful people, measures of business value and professional success are necessary but not sufficient descriptions of the future we want to build together.

Two of Webster’s five definitions of politics: “competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power and leadership” and “the total complex of relations between people living in society”. By that standard, operating a business is a political act. We are accountable for the societal harm and benefit furthered by our decisions.