Quotes About Change

Executives, project leaders, and development teams must embrace a different view of the new product development world, one that not only recognizes change in the business world, but also understands the power of driving down iteration costs to enable experimentation and emergent processes. Understanding these differences and how they affect product development is key to understanding APM.

Agility is the ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment.

The formula for success is simple: deliver today, adapt tomorrow.

The ability to respond to change is good. The ability to create change for competitors is even better. When you create change you are on the competitive offensive. When you respond to competitors' changes you are on the defensive. When you can respond to change at any point in the development lifecycle, even late, then you have a distinct advantage.

Optimization implies that we already know how to do something but that we now need to improve it. Innovation implies that we don't know how to do something, and searching for that knowledge is paramount.

Adaptation can be considered a mindful response to change.

People don't change that much. Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough (Buckingham and Coffman 1999).

Creating change requires innovation: developing new products, creating new sales channels, reducing product development time, customizing products for increasingly smaller market segments. In addition, your company must be able to respond quickly to both anticipated and unanticipated changes created by your competitors and customers.

Agile organizations must adhere to the same values as agile teams: • Delivering value over meeting constraints • Leading the team over managing tasks • Adapting to change over conforming to plans Executives and managers need to lead their organizations in living these values and taking actions based on them—and one of the critical areas on which they need to take action is measuring performance in ways that encourage their organizations to embrace agility.

Some people say we need a third party. I wish we had a second one.

Who knows what technology will emerge in the next five years, let alone 20. Yet the education we provide our children now is supposed to last for decades. We cannot train them for jobs that do not even exist yet, but we can provide them with the minds and tools they'll need to adapt to our ever-changing set of circumstances.

Whatever your level of leadership, use your influence to move the company from strategy-based to culture-focused.

The greatest accelerant to a cultural flame is leadership.

Don't get stuck in the past. Celebrate the company's history (heritage), but focus primarily on the present and future (culture).

Culture change starts on the inside.

Put in the work. Sustainable culture change takes time, patience, persistence, know-how and passion, but it's not impossible and it's completely worthwhile.

Embrace personal culture shifts. Look at every experience as something that happens for you, not to you.

Become a culture catalyst. While protecting the company's heritage, take bold risks that other people only dream about or are too scared to try.

A single leader with a great idea can start a cultural revolution.

Get in the game. Regardless of your leadership level, real culture change only happens by thinking differently, acting on those new ideas and fearlessly defending the decisions later.

Seek out incremental wins. Instead of immediately revolutionizing the company, start small and crush a few things first; once you've earned trust, you will garner bigger responsibilities and influence.

If you hate change, then you're really going to hate extinction.

Defend organizational change. Inevitable resistance can be mitigated if the change is carefully discussed, planned, embraced, communicated and ultimately defended.

Leaders have the power to light up or extinguish the cultural flame of a company.