I am announcing four workshops in Stockholm and Gothenburg.

Each workshop is limited to twelve people, and the first workshop is in just five weeks, so if you are interested in gaining an advantage over your competition, sign up now:

Stockholm:

• Values to Vision, April 15, Stockholm
• Business Strategy - Principles to Practice, May 6, Stockholm

• Values to Vision, April 22
• Business Strategy - Principles, May 13

The audience was great - Knowledgeable, asked a lot of questions, and there was a very interesting discussion afterwards.

I did a trial run for of Reality Dysfunction presentation at Scrumbeers yesterday. The presentation was very well received, though it was much too long. You can read the audience comments and reactions here.

The Scrumbeers gatherings are always fun. This time, it was also very, very useful. The feedback I got will enable me to make the final presentation even more fun, and shorter. Lots shorter. My presentations tend to be about as long as a Hollywood movie. I need to cut this one down to 35 minutes or less before I present at the Lean Kanban Nordic conference on the 12th of Mars.

I'd like to thank the audience not just for being very interested, kind, and fun to spend time with, but also for giving me lots of useful feedback.

I am looking forward to the next Scrumbeer.

Bill Dettmer will hold a course in The Logical Thinking Process in Finland on the 3-5 of April, and the 8-10 of April. Here is a link.

Bill is a well known management and leadership expert. He has written several very good books. I heartily recommend his book The Logical Thinking Process.

Though I have never met Bill, we have corresponded via email. When I wrote my first book, Tempo!, Bill was very helpful and encouraging.

In case you are wondering:

The Logical Thinking Process is a method for solving problems. You can use it in business, or your private life. TLTP is great for facilitating communication and understanding. It beats long boring Word documents or bullet riddled Powerpoint presentations hands down.

I often use it to visualize problems, to help my customers generate solutions, and to communicate and test solutions before implementing them. The tools are simple to use and very effective.

I was asked to submit a presentation proposal to Stop Starting, Start Finishing, the Lean Kanban Nordic conference, 12-13 Mars, 2013, so I did:

If the proposal gets enough votes, I'll get to hold the presentation.

Here is the proposal:

Tempo!: The reality Dysfunction puts the fun back in dysFUNctional. 

How did we end up with so many dysfunctional companies? To fix the problems we face today, we must understand the causes. 

Tempo!: The Reality Dysfunction is a romp through the wild side of management history: It starts with a bang, a train crash the 5th of October 1841, with consequences that cause companies to fail in 2013. 

You will meet the unbeatable fighter pilot, who also figured out how to build an unbeatable organization. You will see what managers must know to lead an Agile development team. 

You will see how most companies are applying fundamental principles of strategy, psychology, and physics backwards, and hurt and disable themselves in the process. You will also find out what to do about it, and who has already succeeded. 

There will be a practical demonstration, with members of the audience, showing how a simple restructuring of work can reduce lead times by 60% or more, while increasing quality. 

And, you will have fun!

When cities grow larger, productivity per person increases. When companies grow larger, productivity per person decreases. Cities can last thousands of years and survive plagues and nuclear blasts. Large companies have an average lifespan of fifteen years, and the lifespan is dropping.

For comparison, I have plotted the power rules governing city and company productivity:

When cities grow larger, productivity per person increases by about 15% each time the city population doubles. In a company, productivity per person drops when the company grows. The fundamental difference: Cities are networks, most companies are hierarchies.

What this graph shows is that a city is much better organized than the average company. But why?

Cities are networks. They are to a large extent self-organizing. Nobody tells you where to live, where to shop, which friends to spend time with, or where to work, or whom to vote for. You figure all that out for yourself, based on the knowledge you have about the city.

Companies are very different: You are told where to sit, what to work on, whom to work with, when to take a break, and who your boss is. You have comparatively little latitude to exercise your own judgement.

What companies are missing is the power of self-organization. Here is another way to look at it:

Donella Meadows's System Intervention Scale

Company leaders usually focus on the low end of the Meadows scale: They set targets like "increase sales by 20%", or "reduce costs by 10%". They make budgets and set project deadlines, which is saying they allocate money and time buffers. Sometimes they make a reorganization, which means they mostly mess around with stock and flow structures.

Cities leave most of that to its inhabitants. City planners are concerned with overall system structure, but they mostly let people make their own decisions, and that is what makes cities resilient, productive, and powerful.

Value streams in functional hierarchies vs. value streams in networks. From my book Tempo!.

Why are companies so much more vulnerable to damage than cities? There are several reasons, but most have to do with the way companies split in order to manage growth. Companies divide into functional departments. This causes problems when information or physical material is moved from one department to another. Hand-offs are difficult to manage, and you can have many value streams that interfere with each other. this problem becomes worse the more cost effective an organization is, because increasing cost effectiveness means reducing the capability to absorb variation in the value streams.

Add to that, that if a single node in a functional organization is damaged in some way, it may affect all value streams running through that organization.

For example, if the IT department suffers from work overload, you can't do anything but wait until they get to your request. I have worked at companies with waiting times of 9-18 months for simple requests like setting up a server.

On the other hand, in a city, if you can't get the service you want when you want it, you go someplace else. If the grocery shop closest to where I live closes, I won't starve. I just shop my food somewhere else.

The amazing thing is that we do have plenty of blueprints for building companies that are as resilient as cities, but with rare exceptions, we don't. There are signs that things are looking up though. We may have a phase shift, a rapid transition from the old hierarchies to network based organizations pretty soon.

When we discuss corruption, and we do, at least in the media, the focus is nearly always on some spectacularly greedy, dishonest, and stupid act. I believe it is a good thing that this kind of corruption is exposed, but there is another, more subtle kind that worries me.

First, let's define the word "corruption":

In philosophical, theological, or moral discussions, corruption is spiritual or moral impurity or deviation from an ideal.

– Corruption, Wikipedia article 

For example, in a contest, we are expected to abide by the rules of that contest. If the judge in a football match judges in favor of the team he likes the most, because he likes it, then the judge is corrupt.

On the other hand, in a popularity contest, voting for the person you like the most is not corrupt. It is the expected behavior.

We have always had a problem with very complex contests, like political elections. Most people do not like to grapple with complex issues, so they substitute something simpler, like:

• Which politician do I like the most?
• How do my friends vote?
• Which policy do I like the most? (Without regard to the total effect of all the policies suggested by the party.)

This is part two of Dave Snowden's keynote. Great stuff.

 Part 1 is here.

Whew! After six months of hard work, LESS!: Essays on Business Transformation is released. I should write something brilliant about this, but I just feel tired and happy. I'll go play with my son instead. I have deserved it, and so has he.

Just one thing: You may recall an earlier cover picture:

You may notice that the cover has changed slightly compared to the earlier version:

John Hagel III has written an excellent Foreword. Check him out. I am immensely proud that he wanted to do that for us. John is a great management writer. He is also Co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, and Director Deloitte Consulting LLP. I am currently reading his latest book, The Power of Pull.

Chances are you already do know about some of the LESS! authors, but I'll give you a list with links so you can have a look:

Dan Bergh Johnsson - Technology evangelist and blogger

Steve Denning - Consultant and former Director of the World Bank
Ola Ellnestam - Co-founder of Agical. Organizer of the excellent Agical Geek Nights(!)
Håkan Forss - Lean/Agile coach, creator of Visual WIP
Brian Hawkes - Founder of Foresite SPA
Maarit Laanti - Agile and Lean coach at Nokia
Henrik Mårtensson - Happy and exhausted
Karl Scotland - Advocate and pioneer of Kanban Software Development
Ari-Pekka Skarp - Coach and organizational developer at Nokia

We have a wide range of expertise spanning finance, management, Agile, Lean, strategy, systems thinking, and complexity theory.

What can you, as a reader, do with it? You can start putting the pieces together. When laid out the way we have, it quickly becomes obvious that there are common themes, things we all need to do to make our companies work better. If we work together, we'll get better results. It is that simple.

By the way, in his Foreword, John does speak very clearly about what happens if one does not change. The things we are writing about used to be nice to have competitive advantages. Now they are necessary for survival. On the up side, once you try, they are fun and exciting to do. :-)

Now, I will go play with my son. Be seeing you!

The LESS! book cover and the first four chapters.

The LESS! book is close to completion. All chapters are in, I have edited more than two thirds of the book. This has been my most enjoyable writing project in a very long time. Writing a book always requires a lot of hard work, but it is also incredibly fun. If you work with great people, which I do, the fun factor goes up...way, way, up!

I have wanted to write a collaborative management book for a couple of years now, but when I got the opportunity, I was not the first to recognize it. Katherine Kirk did!

Katherine and I were both speakers at the LESS 2011 management conference. The conference was a blast. Lots of great speakers: smart, experienced, deep thinkers, and very good at presenting their ideas. I decided to take the opportunity to interview a few of them for a book project that had been on the back burner for a year. I hadn't written much for awhile, and I was really itching to write and publish a new book.

Katherine made a great presentation, so I asked her if I could interview her for a book. She said yes, so we got together, and I got a very interesting interview. One of my questions was "what topic would you really like to see a management book on?" "This conference," Katherine said.

I just sat there for a few seconds. This was just too good an opportunity to miss. Katherine was right. A book written by the conference speakers was a fantastic idea. I mothballed the book I interviewed Katherine for (Sorry, Katherine!), and asked her if it was OK if I took her idea to the conference organizers. She was fine with it, so I contacted Vasco Duarte. He liked the idea too, so I got a list of speaker email addresses, and we were off.

The LESS! project works like this:

Each writer contributes a chapter. Writers are encouraged, but not required, to edit each other's chapters. We have set up a LESS Author group on LinkedIn to make it easy to discuss the book among all authors. I do the final edit, help with graphics, I do the book layout and the cover.

We decided early on that profits from the book should go to a good cause. Some details left to finagle there. I'll tell you more about that when everything has been set up properly.

So, not only were people willing to take on a large amount of work, they were all willing to give the profits away. Oh, and they have all put up with my rough-and-tumble approach to editing. I have been most fortunate to work with such a hardy bunch of management piooneers.

Writing and editing LESS! has been, and still is, a great adventure by its own right. I learn a lot, about management, about writing, editing, layout, cover design, and about collaboration. I work with great people. I also learn a thing or two that will be useful in the future. I'll let you in on what they are, in the near future. You will not be disappointed.

Now, it's back to editing LESS! for me. See you soon.

Bo Hagström is a well known chef, and hosts Sun Food (Swedish: Solens Mat), a Swedish TV show. I met Bo when he signed books in a bookstore. His latest book, Viva la Pasta! is about, you guessed it, pasta!

Bo is on a mission: He wants to teach Swedes about pasta. As it turned out, with good reason. I got a short but interesting lesson.

Bo handed me two strands of pasta and asked me to feel them. One strand was very straight, and felt completely smooth. The other strand was different, slightly crooked. The surface felt slightly rough.

The straight, smooth strand is bad pasta, Bo told me. It is low on nutrients. It does not taste very good either. Because of the smooth surface, it does not absorb flavors from other ingredients.

The slightly crooked strand with the rough surface is great pasta. Much more nutritious. Because it is porous, it can absorb flavors from sauce and other ingredients.

The two kinds of pasta cost the same in the store. The bad pasta outsells the good pasta many times over. Pasta buyers lack the knowledge they need to distinguish between good and bad pasta.

"The cost isn't important," Bo said. "What is important, is the value you get."

I couldn't help laughing, because I realized it's exactly the same thing in my job. In your line of work to, I'm sure.

Imagine that you are a pasta-consultant. You want to teach manufacturers how to make really good pasta, and buyers how to choose the best kind. How would you do it? How would you convince manufacturers to make better pasta when the consumers don't know the difference between good and bad? When the consumers have never tasted good pasta, don't even know there is good pasta.

We can distinguish good from bad only when we have different things to compare with each other. With pasta, you can taste and feel the difference. And, it is no big deal if you buy a package of some brand you haven't tried before, and discover you don't like it.

It is much more difficult to try something new if it is expensive, if the stakes are high, and if it is difficult to assess the result. Picking the right ideas about leadership, management, and process design would fall into that category.

What I learned from Bo, besides choosing pasta, was this: I need to show potential customers something simple, like two strands of spaghetti. It must be something that can be felt, so the difference can be experienced.

Something to think about.

Of course I bought a copy of Bo's book. Pasta experiments await!

Oh, there is one thing more:

Suppose you have a pasta factory, and you want to make the very best pasta. For this, of course, you must have the very best process, so you start a Six Sigma program.

Will that Six Sigma program give you straight, smooth pasta, or crooked, rough to the touch pasta?

There are plenty of good reasons to go to the LESS 2011 management conference. Most of them have to do with fun–not clowning around fun (which has its merits)–but with the doing-meaningful-work and living a life of purpose kind of fun.

However, there is another reason: Survival!

According to John Hagell III, in 1937 the average life expectancy of a Standards & Poor Fortune 500 company was 75 years. Today, it is about 15 years. Let's be a little bit simplistic about this, and draw a straight line between the two data points. Then let's be a bit adventurous, and extrapolate into the future.

If this simple projection holds, by 2030, there won't be any S&P Fortune 500 companies.

I am sure you can see the flaws in this simple model as well as I can:

• There are only two data points. It is very easy to draw the wrong conclusions when using to few data points. (Though many companies are perfectly happy to use a single data point, which enables them to interpret it anyway they want. But I digress.)
• The model is linear. Reality is rarely linear.
• It'll never happen because something else will happen that changes the game.

This post continues the networking story from A brief guide to mingling. I strongly recommend you read that post first, because in it, I describe why I network. Having that perspective is important. If you read  A brief guide to mingling, I think you will agree.

I went to the Gothenburg Book Fair today. The book fair is a yearly event. I go to look for interesting books, and to meet interesting people. Let's dive right in and see what happened:

Erik Lundh, a friend of mine, and I had agreed beforehand to meet at the fair. Anna Sigvardsson, the photographer I met at the mingle last week and I had also decided to meet and have a cup of coffee at the fair.

When I arrived, I had plenty of time before meeting either Erik or Anna, so I did what everyone else at the fair does: I went looking for anything interesting that might catch my eye.

Kersti Ingeborn works at the Mediapool's School Library Service

Pretty soon I found myself talking to Kersti Ingeborn at the Mediapool  School Library Service. We found we had some interests in common. In addition to working at the School Library Service, Kersti is also engaged in health care. After talking briefly, I promised to email her a link to this blog post, and moved on.

Stefan Olsson at Universe Imagine is an author, so we did what authors do when they meet: We swapped books.

One of the nice thing with the book fair is that it is an opportunity for me, as a writer, to meet and speak with other writers. Thus, when I saw Stefan Olsson at Universe Imagine, I went over and talked to him.

Stefan and I swapped writing and publishing experiences for a couple of minutes. Then Stefan suggested that we should swap books, so we did.

It is not fair to hog the time of someone working at the fair, so I told Stefan I would email him a link to this blog post, and moved on.

Astute readers may notice a pattern developing here. I follow up the connections I make, and I offer a reason to continue with some sort of contact. I only do this when I believe there really is some reason to keep in touch. The decision to continue the contact, or not rests entirely with the other person.

As I wrote in  A brief guide to mingling, the purpose is not to sell or advertise anything, but to find and connect with interesting people.

Anna Sigvardsson is a photographer. I wrote about meeting her in A brief guide to mingling.

Of course, if you have agreed to meet two people at a book fair that lasts all day, they will arrive within a few seconds of each other. Erik beat Anna by about 30 seconds. Erik and I needed to talk about a few work related matters, so we did. Then I went to have a cup of coffee with Anna.

You wouldn't believe the size and weight of the backpack I had lugged around all morning. Putting it down, having a cup of coffee, and talking photography and books was a relief you cannot imagine. Unless you to carry around a similar backpack, of course... Thanks Anna!

After meeting with Anna, I hooked up with Eric again. Eric mentioned he wants to meet with a photographer, so I fired off an SMS to Anna to see if she would be interested in meeting Eric. She was, so I helped Eric and Anna set up a meeting. The cellular phone network was a bit overloaded, so we did everything by SMS. SMS wasn't altogether reliable either at the fair, but it worked out OK.

Erik Lundh is a co-author of The System Anatomy, and Jens Fredholm at Studentlitteratur is the publisher.

Eric had a meeting with Jens Fredholm at Studentlitteratur. Eric is a co-author of a recently published book, The System Anatomy. Jens is one of Eric's main contacts. Eric invited me to an after-the-fair for-people-in-the-publishing-business mingle, and off we went to see Jens.

I have met Jens once before, but that was briefly a year ago, so Eric re-introduced us.

It was nice meeting Jens again. Eric, Jens and I had an interesting talk. We decided to go and eat something, and that is when I suddenly saw Alf Fyhrlund and his wife Saga.

From left: Alf Fyhrlund, Saga Fyhrlund, Jens Fredholm, and Erik Lundh.

Alf is the statistician I wrote about in  A brief guide to mingling. Introductions were made all around, and business cards were exchanged. (Just so you know: Alf and I will go to a BNI meeting together on Tuesday.)

After that, the only new connection I made the rest of the evening was with a humungous shrimp sandwich. (Thank you Jens.)

Let's update the network diagram from  A brief guide to mingling:

There are new connections, and some old ones have been maintained (Jens and me). One thing I like about having a diagram like this, is that the people in the diagram are likely to read this post and see it. That increases the probability that they will discover a reason to connect.

If one is steeped in Command & Control culture, it is easy to believe that one should somehow be in control, or "own the network". That does not work. Nobody owns the network. I belong to the network. So does everyone else in the diagram.

Thus, I am not at the center of the network, even though it may look like that in the diagram. It is just that the diagram is drawn from my perspective, and contains the connections I know about.

Draw diagrams from the perspectives of Eric, Jens, or Anna, and they will look quite different, but they will be just as valid. (Try drawing a complete diagram, and you will end up with a mess and go bonkers in the process.)

The network will change today, like it changed yesterday. I know Alf and Olle are likely to talk to each other, and I know Anna and Erik will too. I will ask them how it went, because these are people I like, and I have an interest in their connections working out for the best. Other things will happen too, lots of connections will be made I don't know about, and never will know about. That is as it should be.

What is of interest to mingle event goers is that many of the things I described here, happened because of the mingle event, Göteborgsminglet, but they did not happen at the event. Mingle events are powerful because they generate sparks that may ignite something larger and longer lasting.

Oh, perhaps I should mention: The fair itself was fun too. Lots of interesting books.