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Jim Highsmith’s Take on Daniel Pink’s Intrinsic Motivators

Anne Mullaney | Apr 15, 2010 No Responses

Apr 152010

If you haven’t seen the video of Daniel Pink’s TED talk on the surprising science of motivation, you should take 20 minutes to watch now — it’s worth it. Jim Highsmith recently read Pink’s new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and it got him thinking about how Pink’s ideas about intrinsic motivators — autonomy, mastery, and purpose — match up with the Agile Triangle. Check out Jim’s recent Agile Product & Project Management Executive Update, “Agility, Measurement, and Motivation” (no registration required). In it, Jim reveals how the agile community might use Pink’s message to foster better self-organizing teams and improve workplace satisfaction. What’s your take?

Echolalia: The CIO is Dead! Long Live the CIO!

Vince Kellen, Ph.D. | Apr 7, 2010 4 Responses

Apr 072010

It has been painful to watch the perennial angst of the CIO community. Each year, each conference, and each industry rag frets about what ails the CIO and what kind of CIO the CIO will need to be in the future. When viewed as a whole, the CIO community is paranoid and schizophrenic. Not only do we hear multiple conflicting voices in our collective heads, we have a sense that the future we created is out to get us. Here at Cutter Consortium, we tackled this issue of the future of the CIO with some thought provoking and wildly different perspectives, ranging from the CIO is dead meat to a new kind of CIO is …

The Illusive Definition of Agile

Jim Highsmith | Apr 7, 2010 15 Responses

Apr 072010

What is Agile? Is it a set of practices, a set of values, or a set of mind—or some combination of the three? Is it “Doing Agile” or “Being Agile?” Is agile defined by a checklist of offered practices—the Nokia test for Scrum, or checking 9 of 12 practice boxes for XP? Is agile a mindset, an amalgamation of adaptation, embracing change, transparency, collaboration, complex systems theory, or courage? Is agile the frequent delivery of high quality customer value while effectively adapting to change, regardless of specific practices? (Ken Collier) The right-brained and the left-brained are alive and well in this debate. Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind) refers to this as L-directed thinking, “sequential, …

Building a Business Empire? Follow the Romans

Ken Orr | Apr 6, 2010 No Responses

Apr 062010

Occasionally, I will ask my students, “Why is the Roman Coliseum still standing?” The answer that I’m fishing for is, “Because the folks who tried to tear it down in the Middle Ages for building material were not as good engineers as the folks who put it up hundreds of years earlier.” All this was recently brought to mind because I’ve been reading a series of historical novels set in 9th century England based around the struggles between the Saxons and the Danes. In a number of places in these novels, the central character comments about the Roman ruins and how no one in his time could understand how the ancient Romans built the bridges, …

IT’s Promise for Emerging Markets

Christine Generali | Apr 2, 2010 1 Response

Apr 022010

With over 25 emerging markets in the world today in the process of rapid growth and industrialization, the IT industry is paying close attention to the vast potential that exists to support this economic restructuring. In fact, the collaboration of IT and emerging markets presents new opportunities from which both sides can benefit significantly. Join the debate in the July 2010 Cutter IT Journal — with Guest Editor San Murugesan — as we examine the value and impact IT will have in emerging markets now and in the future. To share your perspective with us, send us a short article abstract by April 20. For the full Call for Papers, visit here.

Don’t Motivate, Inspire

Jim Highsmith | Apr 1, 2010 1 Response

Apr 012010

In a recent blog I wrote about replacing Empowerment with Autonomy. The words we use are important as they both convey a specific meaning, but even more, they bring along historical context. In a similar vein, I propose that agilists use Inspire as a replacement for Motivate. Motivate is similar to Empower, it denotes conveying a privilege to another—they are both extrinsic, not intrinsic. Intrinsic things comes from within, they convey something belonging to a thing by its very nature. Extrinsic things comes from without, they are the result of external forces. When a manager attempts to motivate a person or a team, he is trying to influence behavior by offering incentives. When a manager …

Autonomy, not Empowerment

Jim Highsmith | Mar 24, 2010 2 Responses

Mar 242010

I’ve never really liked the word empowerment, it’s just an acronym for delegation. The dictionary defines delegation as—authorizing subordinates to make certain decisions, and empowerment as—give or delegate power or authority. Many people, myself included, have used the word empowerment to mean something more than delegation, but that extra meaning has been fuzzy. Empowerment has been used in conjunction with self-organizing teams, but often been carried too far, as trying to delegate far more authority to agile teams than was prudent. Similarly, as projects grew from a single team to multiple teams, certain decisions had to be made by specialty teams. So were these teams empowered, or not? Were they “empowered” or “pseudo-powered.” Empowerment also …

The Future Is Actively Creating the Next CIO Now

Robert Charette | Mar 23, 2010 3 Responses

Mar 232010

The current period of financial distress has again placed CIOs under the spotlight, and they are being asked the same question that their predecessors from the early 1990s were asked: “What value is our company getting for its IT investments?” In a bit more déjà vu, the alignment of IT with the needs of the business remains the number one priority of CIOs, CEOs, and BoDs (according to “IT Transformation: Creating a Strategy for Success” published in Economist, August 2008). Why is it, CEOs and BoDs are asking their CIOs, that after 20 years you still can’t solve this problem? To top off this historical symmetry, this is a period — like the early 1990s — …

Quantifying the Start Afresh Option

Israel Gat | Mar 22, 2010 4 Responses

Mar 222010

Source code analysis techniques have progressed to the point that answers to numerous tricky questions about software investment dilemmas can now be answered through quantifying technical debt. Consider, for example, the following scenario: You are a venture capitalist. One of your portfolio companies has been working for a few years now on a promising software application. Various surprises with respect to schedule and functionality have been sprung on you along the way. The company asks for additional $2M to complete development and bring a 500K lines of code to market. Using technical debt quantification techniques you find the technical debt amounts to $1M. You are not at all comfortable “paying back” the technical debt in addition …

Agility in 90 Seconds

Jim Highsmith | Mar 18, 2010 1 Response

Mar 182010

In the early part of the decade Nicholas Cage starred in the movie “Gone in 60 Seconds,” something about stealing cars very rapidly. In the mid-1980’s colleague Ken Orr wrote “The 1-Minute Methodology,” that uncovered the secret to speed—disconnect input from output. If you can steal a car in 60 seconds or execute a methodology in a minute, why not learn to be agile in 90 seconds? I get tired of articles like “The 3 things you must know to be agile,” or “Five easy steps to agile implementation,” or “The secrets of agility unleashed,” or “Agile Mastery in Minutes.” Software development is hard. Agile may be a better way to approach software development, but …

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Jim Highsmith’s Take on Daniel Pink’s Intrinsic Motivators

Echolalia: The CIO is Dead! Long Live the CIO!

The Illusive Definition of Agile

Building a Business Empire? Follow the Romans

IT’s Promise for Emerging Markets

Don’t Motivate, Inspire

Autonomy, not Empowerment

The Future Is Actively Creating the Next CIO Now

Quantifying the Start Afresh Option

Agility in 90 Seconds

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