How Digital Champions Work, Does Everything Need To Be Agile, and Avoiding System Risks

Hope you are all having a great summer. Just 1 more week till the kids are off to school and we finally get our sanity back. Now...onto this month's top 5 articles (sign up here).

1. The Drumbeat Of Digital: Wondering how Digital Champions work differently than their analog competitors? Enclosed are 5 key characteristics that winning teams exhibit.

2. Accelerating Innovation: MIT just published a new report stating that Digitally Mature Companies not just innovate more but innovate differently. Their secret sauce - cross functional teams and proper governance. I could not agree more.

3. Agile Projects: Does every project have to be agile? The short answer is no, but every project should support agility. Especially when the project is a key dependency to other agile development efforts.

4. Two Kinds Of System Risk: When we design new systems we are either overly optimistic on the system's reliability which leads frequent failure and unhappy users or overly pessimistic, over engineer that ultimately slow us down. Magic happens when you remove the emotions and meet in the middle.

5. The Secret Of Getting Things Done: Leaders should stop asking themselves how to get people to act and instead find ways to tap into intrinsic motivation

Book Recommendations:

Turn The Ship Around: One of my favorite books on organization and culture change. The book follows the true story of how the USS Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first by challenging the US Navy's traditional leader-follower approach

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