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Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

https://albert.rit.edu/record=b1539042~S3

If your company’s goal is to become fast, responsive, and agile, more efficiency is not the answer--you need more slack.

Why is it that today’s superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth.

Here is a link to an article from the Lean Post that describes the components of respect and communication and how to consider and approach improvements.

"Show Respect, Psychological Safety, and Social Neuroscience"

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

The often referenced and always worth the re-read article on Google's Project Aristotle Research about teams

Intro to Beyond Budgeting

Building a Technical Career Path at Spotify (read first)

Spotify Technology Engineering (read second)

Things We Learned Creating Technology Career Steps (read last)

This is worth the read for those that are interested in how we actually set career paths considering long term agile teams and variuos roles and organizational constructs (squads, guilds, chapters, etc)

Agile Q & A: How Can Project Managers Adjust for Agile