This is a wonderful toolkit for Agile Leaders or the ones who want to become alike.
On top of 8 practical instruments I found a couple of valuable parts for me: 1) explaining "why" this or that choice can lead to (in)desirable outcomes; 2) examples resonating to my personal 'do nots' I can learn and test now; 3) focus on Agile culture and it's importance.
I'd recommend reading James Clear's "Atomic habits" as an addition to this book to better understand how habits work. Peter Koning describes this topic quite generally.
And surely, I'm interested in his reco of "The fifth discipline" he makes a reference to a few times in the book.
I liked reading this book and found it fun for some practices to experiment with (had the chance to test the impact ladder and found that quite useful combining 5 whys thinking with customer and product impact. Although some practices were a bit a variation of management 3.0 practices, The last part about cultural change and habit tracking drew me the most as the most interesting part of the book, the rest felt less pragmatic from my end . Great book to read nevertheless
Excellent book for starter and experienced Agile Leadership. Great tools that can move your teams and organization. I think this book cannot stand alone - a new agile leader will have to read more about agile frameworks to be able to coach/support an agile transformation.
For a book that promises actionable tools, I found the tools to be lacking the punch that would have made this book good. All in all, there was nothing in the book that I haven't found elsewhere.
A mostly concise book armed with tools that allow for increasing a team's maturity, react to the industry and grow culture. Bookmarks on pages: 16, 65, 74, 103, 111 & 176.
Ok-ish little book that I could recommend to agile leaders. Easy to read with quite useful content. Some of the examples/tools felt a little bit ... hmm, „shallow“ to me, also some resemble other existing tools very much ... still ok. Not the comprehensive handbook that i was searching for.
75 % of employees lack motivation and only 15 % of all teams are able to realise their full potential. As a result, 60% to 80% of all change projects fail. There are many reasons for this: lack of transparency, weak change management, lack of feedback loops, but not least the obsessive idea that successful change can be ensured by detailed project plans. The often empty rituals of planning, commanding and the stifling bureaucracy of control systems nip many improvement initiatives in the bud. These are just some of the symptoms of traditional management.
However, emerging trends in technology, society and politics are changing the market situation faster and faster. Change is becoming mandatory for organizations. It is time to develop organizational forms that learn faster, communicate more transparently, are more personally satisfying and increase motivation and fun. The agile manifesto even claims; "The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organized teams". This claim raises some questions: What do such teams look like? What form of leadership do they need? And how can this be implemented in a way that promotes self-organization?
This book offers practical answers to all these questions. Peter Koning describes how leadership works in a self-organizing environment and gives many tips on how to develop one's own leadership competences. Using concrete case studies from the lean and agile world, he then describes in detail the core competencies that guide action. For each competence, he has concrete tools at hand with which the reader can understand the implementation in practice.
In this book, you will learn how interdisciplinary leadership and shared management responsibility can be applied in practice, and you will also receive many suggestions to specifically expand your own skills.
I simply didn't "click" with this book. On a surface it looks promising, but I had problems with actually connecting that to the real-life situations I'm facing at my work. Maybe I just stumble upon it in a wrong moment.