Quotes from Gene Kim

THE PROBLEM: SOMETHING IN YOUR ORGANIZATION MUST NEED IMPROVEMENT (OR YOU WOULDN'T BE READING THIS BOOK)

Stop starting. Start finishing.

If I fail, I'll try to make sure it's in a new and novel way.

We have even managed to turn into a Twitter trending topic. All

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.' The

we also design our system of work so that we can multiply the effects of new knowledge, transforming local discoveries into global improvements. Regardless of where someone performs work, they do so with the cumulative and collective experience of everyone in the organization.

Wes says defensively, "We all try to juggle the competing priorities as best as we can. That's life, right? Priorities change.

The team quickly made a surprising discovery: only 50% of the source code in their development and test environments matched what was running in production.

failure results in reflection and genuine inquiry.

We increase flow by making work visible, by reducing batch sizes and intervals of work, and by building quality in, preventing defects from being passed to downstream work centers. By

We should have done this a long time ago. We bump up the priorities of things all the time, but we never really know what just got bumped down. That is, until someone screams at us, demanding to know why we haven't delivered something.

the leader's role is to create the conditions so their team can discover greatness in their daily work.

work can bounce between teams endlessly due to incomplete information, or work can be passed onto downstream work centers with problems that remain completely invisible until we are late delivering what we promised to the customer or our application fails in the production environment.

Researchers at Google spent years on Project Oxygen and found that psychological safety was one of the most important factors of great teams: where there was confidence that the team would not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.

He sounded just like that dude from Pulp Fiction. He even quoted the line about the day of reckoning and striking people down with great vengeance and furious anger.

Work is not done when Development completes the implementation of a feature—rather, it is only done when our application is running successfully in production, delivering value to the customer.

John Allspaw says, every incident is a learning opportunity, an unplanned investment that was made without our consent.

In any value stream, there is always a direction of flow, and there is always one and only one constraint; any improvement not made at that constraint is an illusion." If

I'm not suggesting Brent is doing this deliberately, but I wonder whether Brent views all his knowledge as a sort of power. Maybe some part of him is reluctant to give that up. It does put him in this position where he's virtually impossible to replace.

To my surprise, Erik interrupts. "Well put, Bill. You've just described 'technical debt' that is not being paid down. It comes from taking shortcuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn't pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work.

interrupting technology workers is easy, because the consequences are invisible to almost everyone, even though the negative impact to productivity may be far greater than in manufacturing.

whether Ops used version control was a higher predictor for both IT performance and organizational performance than whether Dev used version control.

Automated testing helps developers discover their mistakes quickly (usually within minutes), which enables faster fixes as well as genuine learning-learning that is impossible when mistakes are discovered six months later during integration testing, when memories and the link between cause and effect have long faded. Instead of accruing technical debt, problems are fixed as they are found, mobilizing the entire organization if needed, because global goals outweigh local goals.

This process of applying stress to increase resilience was named antifragility by author and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb.