Quotes from Gene Kim

According to Lean, our most important customer is our next step downstream.

I need you to say no! We cannot afford to have this leadership team be order takers. We pay you to think, not just

Instead of project teams where developers are reassigned and shuffled around after each release, never receiving feedback on their work, we keep teams intact so they can keep iterating and improving, using those leanings to better achieve their goals.

The Goal by Dr. Eli Goldratt.

Leaders are responsible for the design and operation of processes at a higher level of aggregation where others have less perspective and authority.

Picture this scenario: You are in an organization where everyone is making decisions, solving important problems every day, and teaching others what they've learned," Erik says. "Your adversary is an organization where only the top leaders make decisions. Who will win? Your victory is inevitable.

Small batch sizes result in less WIP, faster lead times, faster detection of errors, and less rework.

While we're dreaming big dreams here, let me say this," he continues. "In ten years, I'm certain every COO worth their salt will have come from IT. Any COO who doesn't intimately understand the IT systems that actually run the business is just an empty suit, relying on someone else to do their job.

Even under the best circumstances, some knowledge is inevitably lost with each handoff. With

It's not a good sign when they're still attaching parts to the space shuttle at liftoff time.

We cannot achieve deployments on-demand if we always have to wait weeks or months for production or test environments. The countermeasure is to create environments that are on demand and completely self-serviced, so that they are always available when we need them.

Psychological safety slips away so easily, like when the leader micromanages, can't say 'I don't know,' or acts like a know-it-all,

Paige might be able to stop working. But is it worth having to deal with

In order to speak clearly, you need to be able to think clearly. And to think clearly, you usually need to be able to write it clearly.

If we single-task on the most important project for two weeks and still aren't able to make a big dent, then I think we should all find new day jobs.

There were other surprises, as well. They used a technique called Wardley Maps to better localize what parts of various value chains were commodities and should be outsourced, which should be purchased, and which should be kept in-house because they created durable, competitive advantage. They used this exercise to methodically disposition their technology stacks, given the business context.

The goal is clear: enable fast and safe deployments into production, and for the first time in years, do it using the same environments across Dev, Test, and Production.

Let the inevitable happen, and we'll see what we can learn from it.

We cannot achieve deployments on demand if each of our production code deployments take weeks or months to perform (i.e., each deployment requires 1,300 manual, error-prone steps involving up to three hundred engineers). The countermeasure is to automate our deployments as much as possible, with the goal of being completely automated so they can be done self-service by any developer.

We cannot achieve deployments on demand if every code deployment requires two weeks to set up our test environments and data sets, and another four weeks to manually execute all our regression tests. The countermeasure is to automate our tests so we can execute deployments safely and to parallelize them so the test rate can keep up with our code development rate.

She's often heard that IT is the nerve center of the entire organization, because over the last thirty years almost every business process has been automated through IT systems. But for whatever reason, businesses have allowed their nervous system to become degraded, like multiple sclerosis disrupting the flow of information within the brain and between the brain and the body.

As Dr. W. Edwards Deming is famously paraphrased, "Learning is not compulsory...neither is survival.

Bash is the disease you die with, but don't die of.

In technology, our work happens almost entirely within complex systems with a high risk of catastrophic consequences. As