Jez Humble > Quotes

“If it hurts, do it more frequently, and bring the pain forward.”
― Jez Humble, Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation

“Instead of creating controls to compensate for pathological cultures, the solution is to create a culture in which people take responsibility for the consequences of their actions”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“The long-term value of an enterprise is not captured by the value of its products and intellectual property but rather by its ability to continuously increase the value it provides to customers — and to create new customers — through innovation.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“There are two rules of thumb architects follow when decomposing systems. First, ensure that adding a new feature tends to change only one service or a component at a time. This reduces interface churn.6 Second, avoid “chatty” or fine-grained communication between services. Chatty services scale poorly and are harder to impersonate for testing purposes.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“So, when should you think about automating a process? The simplest answer is, “When you have to do it a second time.” The third time you do something, it should be done using an automated process. This fine-grained incremental approach rapidly creates a system for automating the repeated parts of your development, build, test, and deployment process.”
― Jez Humble, Continuous delivery

“the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“In his revolutionary work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1970, Paulo Freire describes what is still the dominant model of teaching today. In this model, students are viewed as empty “bank accounts” to be filled with knowledge by teachers — not as participants who have a say in what and how they learn. This model is not designed to enable students to learn — especially not to learn to think for themselves — but rather to control the learning process, students’ access to information, and their ability to critically analyze it. In this way, the education system perpetuates existing social structures and power hierarchies.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“In reality, however, this type of command and control has not been fashionable in military circles since 1806 when the Prussian Army, a classic plan-driven organization, was decisively defeated by Napoleon’s decentralized, highly motivated forces. Napoleon used a style of war known as maneuver warfare to defeat larger, better-trained armies. In maneuver warfare, the goal is to minimize the need for actual fighting by disrupting your enemy’s ability to act cohesively through the use of shock and surprise. A key element in maneuver warfare is being able to learn, make decisions, and act faster than your enemy — the same capability that allows startups to disrupt enterprises.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“the project approach judges people according to whether work is completed on time and on budget, not based on the value delivered to customers, productivity gets measured based on output rather than outcomes.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“No major piece of work should be fully funded before we have evidence to support the business and economic model on which it is based, and this exploration must be done with small, cross-functional teams with a limited runway,”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“To achieve this, we rely on people being able to make local decisions that are sound at a strategic level — which, in turn, relies critically on the flow of information, including feedback loops.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

“the flexibility provided by software can, when correctly leveraged, accelerate the innovation cycle.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“features often fail to deliver the expected value).”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“neither intuition nor expert opinion are good gauges of the value our ideas have for users.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“When everybody in the organization has been trained to employ the scientific approach to innovation as part of their daily work, we will have created a generative culture. We achieve this by practicing the experimental approach until it becomes habitual, part of our repertoire, using the Improvement Kata described in Chapter 6. That is what allows an organization to adapt rapidly to its changing environment. Toyota calls this “building people before building cars.”66”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best. W. Edwards Deming”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“The key to creating a lean enterprise is to enable those doing the work to solve their customers’ problems in a way that is aligned with the strategy of the wider organization.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“seem banal, but it was an incredibly powerful experience for many of the UAW employees. The TPS makes building quality into products the highest priority, so a problem must be fixed as soon as possible after it’s discovered, and the system must then be improved to try and prevent that from happening again. Workers and managers cooperate to make this possible. The moment a worker discovers a problem, he or she can summon the manager by pulling on a cord (the famous andon cord). The manager will then come and help to try and resolve the problem. If the problem cannot be resolved within the time available, the worker can stop the production line until the problem is fixed. The team will later experiment with, and implement, ideas to prevent the problem from occurring again.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Product people become judged on their ability to create comprehensive specification documents and well-crafted business cases, not on whether the products and features they come up with deliver value to users.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Such programs fail to recognize that turning innovation or change into an event rather than part of our daily work can never produce significant or lasting results.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“In most enterprises, around 30%–50% of the total time to market is spent on activity which provides almost zero value in terms of mitigating the risks of our investments. This”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Look for obstacles constantly and treat them as opportunities to experiment and learn.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective” [deming],”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Don’t slow down delivery. Decide, when needed, at the right level. Do it with the right people. Go see for yourself. Only do it if it adds value. Trust and verify.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Giving people pride in their work rather than trying to motivate them with carrots and sticks is an essential element of a high-performance culture.4”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

“Gamestorming by David Gray et al.,69 and the supporting Go Gamestorming Wiki,”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Enterprises that use design thinking and user experience (UX) design strategically to delight customers at each step of their interaction with the organization have thrived: research shows companies which apply UX design in this way experience faster growth and higher revenues.2”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“It is hard to let go of the long-held belief that strong, centralized control provides valuable efficiencies. However well it may have served us in an era of lower complexity and slower technical advances, it now creates barriers that prevent us from adapting quickly to emerging opportunities.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“As Deloitte’s Shift Index shows, the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company has declined from around 75 years half a century ago to less than 15 years today.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean