Our friends at it-agile gave you and me a Christmas gift. It's a letter from Santa about his lost sleigh, and it starts like this... (more…)

  Whether you have read The Responsibility Process or not, you'll likely enjoy this interview. Why? Igor prepared. (more…)

If you care about personal, team, and organizational agility, run—don't walk—to buy Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success. Author Amr Elssamadisy has a rich background helping companies adopt agile practices. Amr has worked with Thoughtworks and Valtech (where I first met him), and is now a partner with Gemba Systems whose three partners I know, like, trust, and...

This article, New Breed of Business Gurus Rises, in Monday's Wall Street Journal says that 3 of the top 5 business gurus are focused on issues of psychology. That means managing attention is what leaders want to learn about. The attention of one's employees is a leader's most scarce resource. When you learn to focus attention by the way you...

Projects@Work published an excerpt from Kimberly Wiefling's new book evocatively titled Scrappy Project Management: The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces. I haven't read the rest of the book although I look forward to doing so after seeing the 80-second video she posted on Amazon.com (see what she does with the PMBOK!). To view it, follow the book...

Last week in the Southern California mountain resort town of Lake Arrowhead a small group of senior leaders came together to launch their trek toward building a great company. I was honored to support them. And they were thrilled with their experience and the results of their meeting. Here's what my client reported to me in the days following the...

InfoQ's Deborah Hartmann reviews the book The Responsibility Virus: How Control Freaks, Shrinking Violets and the Rest of Us Can H Arness the Power of True Partnership, which was published about a year after my own Teamwork Is An Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility. I haven't read the book cover-to-cover though I'm well aware of it....

Fellow Cutter consultant Jeroen van Tyn from writes: Christopher, I'm writing a Cutter Benchmark Review on IT Trends, and one of the trends relates to innovation.  I remember a conversation we had at the Cutter Summit earlier this year, and I wanted to reference something you shared with me. You made a statement something like, true collaborative innovation happens when...

Awake in the middle of the night, I arose for a cup of go-back-to-sleep tea and found Alan Weiss’s newsletter Balancing Act® in my in-box. Alan Image of Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weissis the best-selling author of Million Dollar Consulting wherein he tells how to make a million dollars a year as a solo consultant with no employees and thus low overhead, so you get to keep the entire million and don’t have to manage anyone. I’m not there, but I have been on his mailing list for years now and I enjoy a love/hate relationship with Weiss. More about that below.