Blogging at work

You remember that a while ago I explained that my company has been trying to push a culture makeover.  They've taken this to really significant lengths: one of the most striking is that they have set up their very own in-house social networking system and encourage us all to use it.

This morning I was browsing through it and came upon somebody's post about how we had to become more agile.  It was slightly more interesting than the normal run of most of these exhortations -- exhortations which largely seem to rely on the principle that if you repeat the word "agile" often enough it will make you a better company.  What was more interesting was to watch my own reaction: I thought I might have something to say in reply, but I really didn't know what I thought about his post ... so I started writing.  One thing I have learned how to do after six-plus years writing this blog is to dive into a topic, explore it for a few paragraphs, and figure out what I think about it in the process of typing.  It's a useful skill, I guess.  For what it is worth, I did revise this before posting it on one of the internal blogs, but not to change the conclusion.  All I did was to improve the wording, take out needless words, and generally make it punchier.

I'm not sure this counts as a productive accomplishment today, but I sure had fun. 

Just for the sake of leaving a record that I really did write something today (the two posts from earlier were both written last night), I'll append it here.
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Almost a month ago, "John Doe" wrote a very interesting blog post about being agile, including some good references to the external literature.

One article he cited was by Andy Beal about "5 Reasons why being Agile is more important than being perfect".  At the end of this article, Beal identifies a couple of applications where he'd rather wait for the perfect solution than go with the fastest one (brain surgery and brakes).  But these exceptions don't contradict the main point.  It's all a question of what you want.

In the market this question has to be rephrased as "Who do we want to be?"  Since nobody gets to be a monopoly, there's always differentiation: this supplier is the cheapest, that one is the fastest, the other over there is the most reliable.  Which are we?  Traditionally [our company] has chosen to be reliable even at the expense of the other two.  And when you are making brakes -- or doing brain surgery -- that's the right choice.  But it's often not an agile choice.  So why do we care about agility now?

Two reasons. 

First, it's a useful corrective against the natural tendency of all organizations to fossilize.  Striving to be agile, we test all our structures and break down the ones that have become deadweight.

Second, the market itself is ever more agile.  "John Doe" writes about winning [a certain big account recently], and everybody will have another favorite example of his own [where our ability to be flexible for the customer won us some business].  In any market where technology is advancing, offerings change quickly and companies are either agile or left behind.

But nothing is free.  One cost of agile methods is that they are hard to scale.  Remember that our vision is to be everywhere, [selling] worldwide.  And one of our strengths is that we already have a worldwide scope, which gives us unparalleled reach and a massive manufacturing capacity.  Scalability matters to us.  So we have to ask, "Can we be agile and worldwide too? Or does agility force us to work like hundreds of small companies who all use the same brand name? Does leveraging our global scale efficiently force us, because of the sheer burden of planning and communication, to slow down and narrow our offerings?"

I don't know the answer.  I sure hope we can do both.  But doing both will require some creativity, and we have to remember that it won't just drop in our laps.  There is a challenge here for us to meet.