The Idealcast with Gene Kim by IT Revolution
 

The Idealcast with Gene Kim by IT Revolution

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Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author, Gene Kim hosts technology and business leaders to explore the dangerous, shifting digital landscape. Gain insights and solutions to help your enterprise thrive in an evolving business world.

Episodes

Leadership Development and Balancing Creativity and Control with Admiral John Richardson

Thursday Apr 01, 2021

Thursday Apr 01, 2021

In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years, the top officer in the Navy. Before that, Admiral Richardson served as director of the US Naval Reactors, which is comprehensively responsible for the safe and reliable operation of the US Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion program.

 

In part one of this two-part conversation, Kim and Admiral Richardson explore how the Department of Defense and the armed services can lead the way to respond effectively to the digital disruption agenda. Admiral Richardson discusses how he operationalized creating a high velocity learning dynamic across the entire US Navy. He also presents his theories on how we need to balance compliance and creativity. And finally, he presents some amazing examples of how to strip away the barnacles from processes, those layers of controls and supervision that may have crept in over the decades.

 

Also joining the conversation is Dr. Steve Spear, who has written extensively about the US Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program program in his book The High-Velocity Edge.

 

ABOUT THE GUESTS

 

Admiral John Richardson served as the Chief of Naval Operations for four years, which is the professional head of the US Navy. While in the Navy, Richardson served in the submarine force and commanded the attack submarine USS Honolulu in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for which he was awarded the Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale Inspirational Leadership Award. He also served as the Director of Naval Reactors, responsible for the design, safety, certification, operating standards, material control, maintenance, disposal, and regulatory oversight of over 100 nuclear power plants operating on nuclear-powered warships deployed around the world.

 

Since his retirement in August 2019, he has joined the boards of several major corporations and other organizations, including Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, and Exelon, a Fortune 100 company that operates the largest fleet of nuclear plants in America and delivers power to over 10 million customers. 

 

Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High-Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System. A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Dr. Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so that they know better and faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple industries including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, US Army rapid equipping, and US Navy readiness.  

Visit Steve Spear's Website

 

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

  • Why high-velocity learning was so important to Admiral Richardson when he was the Chief of Naval Operations.
  • How Admiral Richardson operationalized creating a high velocity learning dynamic across the entire US Navy.
  • His views on the need to balance compliance and creativity.
  • Specific advice on what leaders must do when the balance tilts too much toward compliance and has taken away people’s ability to unleash their full creative potential.
  • Examples of how to strip away the barnacles from processes.
  • Why radical delegations are so important.
  • How Admiral Richardson came to believe that creating leadership communities and connections are essential.
  • Where software competencies must show up in modern organizations.

 

RESOURCES

 

TIMESTAMPS

 

[00:00] Intro

[01:54] Meet Admiral John Richardson

[04:00] Responding effectively to the digital disruption agenda

[07:05] Admiral Richardson in his own words and his Act 2

[08:27] Meet Steve Spear

[09:29] How Steve’s work caught Admiral Richardson’s attention

[11:46] Admiral Richardson’s efforts to create a learning dynamic

[19:18] A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority

[27:01] What he does with leader who’s afraid of the concept

[28:48] Contrasts between learning culture and compliance culture

[37:37] Fingerspitzengefühl

[41:03] Steve’s thoughts on compliance vs creativity

[43:47] Leadership development and compliance control

[48:38] Addressing near misses

[56:29] DevOps Enterprise Summit 2021 in Europe

[57:52] Scar tissue processes

[1:01:22] Finding a balance with leaders

[1:09:43] The story behind general Eisenhower and General Patton

[1:14:02] The three layers of creativity

[1:27:23] How technology changed a sense of community

[1:33:30] Admiral Richardson’s working relationships in the Navy

[1:42:19] Where the software capabilities need to show up

[1:48:02] Navy Leader Development Framework Version 3.0

[1:51:22] Outro

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The Rise of Knowledge Work, and its Structure and Dynamics with Jeffrey Fredrick

Thursday Dec 03, 2020

Thursday Dec 03, 2020

In the final episode of the first season of The Idealcast, Gene Kim sits down with Jeffrey Fredrick, coauthor of Agile Conversations, to synthesize and reflect upon some of the major themes from the entire season. 

In Gene’s continued quest to understand why organizations behave the way they do, Fredrick helps connect the dots and points to new areas that deserve more study. They discuss the nature of knowledge work, including how software creation requires so much more conversation and joint cognitive work, and the challenges this presents. They also dive into the bodies of knowledge that are required as we push more decision making and value creation to the edges of the organization. 

Then, Gene and Fredrick revisit the concept of integration and why it’s so much more important now than 50 years ago. And finally, they discuss why “Are you happy?” and “Are you proud of your work?” are two very powerful questions and what they actually reveal about people and the work they’re performing. And why this is all so important as we try to create organizations that maximize learning for everyone.

BIO:

Jeffrey Fredrick is an internationally recognized expert in software development with over 25 years’ experience covering both sides of the business/technology divide. His experience includes roles as Vice President of Product Management, Vice President of Engineering, and Chief Evangelist. He has also worked as an independent consultant on topics including corporate strategy, product management, marketing, and interaction design. Jeffrey is based in London and is currently Managing Director of TIM, an Acuris Company. He also runs the London Organisational Learning Meetup and is a CTO mentor through CTO Craft.

 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jtf 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jfredrick/

Website: https://www.conversationaltransformation.com/

 

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

  • The nature of knowledge work and how it requires more conversation and joint cognitive work and the challenges it presents
  • The body of knowledge required in decision making and value creation for the organization
  • Concepts of integration and why it’s important now
  • What the questions, “Are you happy?” and “Are you proud of your work?,” reveal about people and their work
  • How Dr. Thomas Kuhns’s work pertains to management models

RESOURCES

 

TIMESTAMPS

 

[00:11] Intro

[03:13] Meet Jeffrey Fredrick

[03:54] Why conversations are important

[08:03] Why conversations are more important now than 100 years ago

[11:02] The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

[13:08] Integration

[16:33] The need for better integration now

[20:18] What is information hiding and why it’s important

[26:32] The pace of change moves the trade-off

[31:41] Two important questions to ask

[42:17] The system of fast and slow

[48:25] Selection bias

[51:07] Thank you from Gene

[52:13] Jeffrey’s significant a-ha moment

[59:45] Injecting change

[1:06:24] Structure and dynamics

[1:12:44] Command in War

[1:23:39] Complaining about a feature factory

[1:25:40] Standardized work and integrating feedback

[1:22:21] Two elements of information flow

[1:36:49] Insights on peer programming

[1:43:54] Learning more and learning earlier

[1:45:55] Is there something missing?

[1:48:50] Contacting Jeffrey Fredrick

[1:49:55] Outro

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The Principles and Practices Behind Team of Teams (Part 2) with David Silverman & Jessica Reif

Thursday Oct 29, 2020

Thursday Oct 29, 2020

This episode of The Idealcast features the second part of Gene Kim’s interview with Team of Teams coauthor and CrossLead CEO David Silverman and CrossLead Head of R&D Jessica Reif. 

In this episode, they take up the topic of how internal marketplaces are structures that can connect mid-level leaders to each other, helping allocate scarce resources to where they're needed most, which enables the further unlocking of capacities.

They discuss challenges around the cost of change and the new skills that mid-level leaders need in order to survive and thrive in an era where being functionally excellent in one’s own silo is not enough.

They further talk about the similarities between special operations and agile, especially comparing and contrasting terms that further concretize concepts the agile and DevOps community have held for years but struggled to name. And finally, they discuss where we go from here.

BIO:

David Silverman

Entrepreneur, bestselling author, and former Navy SEAL, David Silverman is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CrossLead, Inc. Founded in 2016, CrossLead is a technology company whose leadership and management framework is used by leaders and companies around the globe.  

In 2015, David co-authored the New York Times bestselling leadership and management book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. As a thought leader on culture change, high-performing teams, and leadership, he is a frequent guest speaker for business leaders and conferences around the globe.

After his 13-year career as a Navy SEAL, David and a group of like-minded friends sought to reinvent the way the world does business in today’s dynamic environment. Based on their collective service in the world’s premier Special Operations Units, they devised a holistic leadership and management framework called CrossLead. Today, CrossLead is a leading framework for scaling agile practices across the enterprise. Implemented in some of the world’s most successful organizations, CrossLead drives faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in productivity, improvement in employee engagement, and more predictable business results. 

Prior to CrossLead, David co-founded the McChrystal Group where he served as CEO for five years. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, David served as a Navy SEAL from 1998-2011. He graduated Basic Underwater Demolition School (BUD/S) Class 221 in 1999 as the Honor Man. David deployed six times around the world, including combat deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia where he received three Bronze Stars and numerous other commendations. 

David serves on the advisory board of the Headstrong Project and is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization. David lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Hollis, and their two children. He maintains an active lifestyle as a waterman and runner.  

Twitter: @dksilverman

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-silverman-648035a/

Website: https://www.crosslead.com/

Jess Reif                                                                                       

Jessica Reif is the Director of Research & development for CrossLead Inc, where she leverages the latest management research to develop new approaches to increasing business agility for CrossLead’s clients. She leads CrossLead’s education efforts and has developed training programs that have been delivered to over 20,000 leaders. Previously, Jessica served as a Product Delivery Manager for applied machine learning and engineering teams at Oracle Data Cloud, where her role was to facilitate agile development among a team-of-teams. Jessica holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. In her free time, she enjoys golfing, baking, and hiking. 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jess_Reif

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-reif/

Website: https://www.crosslead.com/

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

  • How internal marketplaces are structures that can connect mid-level leaders to each other and allocate scarce resources to where they are needed most
  • Concept and terms found within the agile and special operations communities
  • What happens when the cost of change is intolerably high
  • New skills that midlevel need to survive and thrive to help organizations win

 

RESOURCES

 

TIMESTAMPS

 

[00:08] Intro

[01:55] What parallels Jessica Rief sees in the technology domain

[08:56] What Steve Spear’s story means to David Silverman

[14:47] Empowerment is not inherently a good thing

[20:35] The Core, Chronic Conflict and the Marshmallow Challenge

[28:28] Leaders, get comfortable with the unknown and trust somebody

[37:39] Micromanagement in the technology space

[41:11] IT Revolution’s new books and virtual library

[42:39] Advice to micromanagers

[46:34] Auditing your time appropriate to your level of leadership

[48:28] Solving problems closer to the edge

[53:20] The role of mid-level management

[58:47] What skillsets are important to winning

[1:07:22] Leadership theories

[1:08:47] How Team of Teams has affected daily work

[1:18:32] How to contact Jessica and David

[1:19:40] Thomas Kuhn’s Paradigm shift

[1:23:22] Newton’s three laws of motions

[1:25:35] Outro

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(Dispatch from the Scenius) David Silverman’s DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2020 Talk

Thursday Oct 08, 2020

Thursday Oct 08, 2020

In the latest Dispatch from the Scenius, Gene Kim shares David Silverman’s 2020 presentation from DevOps Enterprise Summit London - Virtual. In a continuation of Episode 11, the Team of Teams coauthor and CEO of CrossLead talks about the key concepts from Team of Teams, and provides even more context for so many of the topics covered in last week’s episode. 

 

David talks about the genesis of the joint special operations command, which was created after the failure of the daring Iran hostage rescue in 1979, and how it found itself in 2003 in Afghanistan and Iraq, tactically winning but strategically losing, unable to find terrorist leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq. He describes the principles that they drew upon, which will be familiar to almost everyone in the DevOps community, the practices that it led to, the amazing outcomes that resulted, as well as the leadership skills needed in this new world. 



BIO:

David Silverman

Entrepreneur, bestselling author, and former Navy SEAL, David Silverman is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CrossLead, Inc. Founded in 2016, CrossLead is a technology company whose leadership and management framework is used by leaders and companies around the globe.  

In 2015, David co-authored the New York Times bestselling leadership and management book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. As a thought leader on culture change, high-performing teams, and leadership, he is a frequent guest speaker for business leaders and conferences around the globe.

After his 13-year career as a Navy SEAL, David and a group of like-minded friends sought to reinvent the way the world does business in today’s dynamic environment. Based on their collective service in the world’s premier Special Operations Units, they devised a holistic leadership and management framework called CrossLead. Today, CrossLead is a leading framework for scaling agile practices across the enterprise. Implemented in some of the world’s most successful organizations, CrossLead drives faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in productivity, improvement in employee engagement, and more predictable business results. 

Prior to CrossLead, David co-founded the McChrystal Group where he served as CEO for five years. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, David served as a Navy SEAL from 1998-2011. He graduated Basic Underwater Demolition School (BUD/S) Class 221 in 1999 as the Honor Man. David deployed six times around the world, including combat deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia where he received three Bronze Stars and numerous other commendations. 

David serves on the advisory board of the Headstrong Project and is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization. David lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Hollis, and their two children. He maintains an active lifestyle as a waterman and runner.  

Twitter: @dksilverman

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-silverman-648035a/

Website: https://www.crosslead.com/

 

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

  • Key concepts from the book, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
  • The genesis of the joint special operations command
  • How the principles, practices, outcomes and leaderships relate to the DevOps community

 

RESOURCES

 

 

TIMESTAMPS

 

[00:08] Intro

[01:56] Meet David Silverman

[04:05] The inception of US special operations

[07:35] Best practices associated with management

[10:59] Cynefin framework

[11:53] Complexity environment

[14:32] How to senior business leadership can communicate effectively and persuasively

[15:59] Back to fundamentals

[19:55] DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual

[21:33] Think as a living organism

[23:19] Model of radical transparency

[24:02] How to make it work inside your organizations

[31:24] How to define great leadership

[33:53] David’s request for examples

[34:22] Coming up in the next episode

[35:42] Outro

 

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The Principles and Practices Behind Team of Teams (Part 1) with David Silverman & Jessica Reif

Thursday Oct 01, 2020

Thursday Oct 01, 2020

In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim sits down with Team of Team’s coauthor and CEO of Crosslead, David Silverman, and Director of Research and Development at CrossLead, Jessica Reif, for a two-part interview. 

In Team of Teams, David and his coauthors explained how the Joint Special Forces Task Force in Iraq was struggling to achieve its mission, and how they turned it into a success. Their experience led to a deep and critical rethinking of almost everything in US military services and in the commercial industry. Now at CrossLead, David works with Jessica Reif to continue researching and codifying these practices into their management framework.

In Part 1 of the interview, Gene and his guests discuss the structure and dynamics of the transformation described in Team of Teams and how these leadership characteristics are needed today in the new ways of working. This leadership framework reinforces the concepts of common purpose, shared consciousness, empowerment, and trust within organizations to help teams work together more effectively in complex environments, particularly when they have to continuously adapt to change. Stay tuned for Part 2.

 

BIO:

David Silverman

Entrepreneur, bestselling author, and former Navy SEAL, David Silverman is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CrossLead, Inc. Founded in 2016, CrossLead is a technology company whose leadership and management framework is used by leaders and companies around the globe.  

In 2015, David co-authored the New York Times bestselling leadership and management book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. As a thought leader on culture change, high-performing teams, and leadership, he is a frequent guest speaker for business leaders and conferences around the globe.

After his 13-year career as a Navy SEAL, David and a group of like-minded friends sought to reinvent the way the world does business in today’s dynamic environment. Based on their collective service in the world’s premier Special Operations Units, they devised a holistic leadership and management framework called CrossLead. Today, CrossLead is a leading framework for scaling agile practices across the enterprise. Implemented in some of the world’s most successful organizations, CrossLead drives faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in productivity, improvement in employee engagement, and more predictable business results. 

Prior to CrossLead, David co-founded the McChrystal Group where he served as CEO for five years. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, David served as a Navy SEAL from 1998-2011. He graduated Basic Underwater Demolition School (BUD/S) Class 221 in 1999 as the Honor Man. David deployed six times around the world, including combat deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia where he received three Bronze Stars and numerous other commendations. 

David serves on the advisory board of the Headstrong Project and is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization. David lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Hollis, and their two children. He maintains an active lifestyle as a waterman and runner.  

Twitter: @dksilverman

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-silverman-648035a/

Website: https://www.crosslead.com/

Jess Reif                                                                                       

Jessica Reif is the Director of Research & development for CrossLead Inc, where she leverages the latest management research to develop new approaches to increasing business agility for CrossLead’s clients. She leads CrossLead’s education efforts and has developed training programs that have been delivered to over 20,000 leaders. Previously, Jessica served as a Product Delivery Manager for applied machine learning and engineering teams at Oracle Data Cloud, where her role was to facilitate agile development among a team-of-teams. Jessica holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. In her free time, she enjoys golfing, baking, and hiking. 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jess_Reif

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-reif/

Website: https://www.crosslead.com/

 

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

  • The philosophy and thinking behind the book, Team of Teams
  • The organization and management required to support the large group of personnel involved in the mission described in the book
  • The dramatic changes in the transformations mentioned in the book and how and why it worked
  • The structure and dynamics before and after the transformation
  • What leadership characteristics are needed in this new way of working
  • Ops Intelligence Update Call
  • What was required to increase the temp of operations

 

RESOURCES

 

TIMESTAMPS

 

[00:08] Intro

[03:26] Meet David Silverman

[05:50] Meet Jessica Rief

[06:59] Writing down his experiences to teach

[12:58] Who are David’s students and what he was teaching

[14:05] Applying these techniques to COVID-19

[17:54] Comparing David’s experience to General Stanley McChrystal’s experience

[23:30] Remembering Defense Information Systems Agency CTO Dawn Meyerriecks’ org chart

[25:30] Getting out of own way

[28:31] Top differences in what David was trying to achieve

[33:46] Compare and contrast the leadership characteristics

[37:24] Jess reflecting on changes required at various levels of leaderships

[39:58] A look at structural changes or lack thereof

[47:50] The chessmaster vs the gardner

[49:18] Changing the middle management

[56:28] DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual

[58:04] The frozen middle

[1:00:06] Advice to define the work

[1:06:10] Ops Intelligence Update Call

[1:15:29] Create concrete manifestation of the vision

[1:23:30] The dynamics of having the Ops Intelligence Update Call

[1:26:03] The need for middle management to augment the process

[1:30:55] Gene’s favorite part of Team of Teams

[1:34:43] Creating these relationships in a large scale

[1:39:55] Successful execution drives strategy

[1:41:51] How to reach David and Jessica

[1:43:06] Outro

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The Surprising Implications of Architecting for Generality with Michael Nygard

Thursday Sep 10, 2020

Thursday Sep 10, 2020

On this continuation of Gene Kim’s interview with Michael Nygard, Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, they discuss his reflections on Admiral Rickover's work with the US Naval Reactor Core and how it may or may not resonate with the principles we hold so near and dear in the DevOps community. They also tease apart the learnings from the architecture of the Toyota Production System and their ability to drive down the cost of change. 

They also discuss how we can tell when there are genuinely too many “musical notes” or when those extra notes allow for better and simpler systems that are easier to build and maintain and can even make other systems around them simpler too? And how so many of the lessons and sensibilities came from working with Rich Hickey, the creator of the Clojure programming language. 

Bio:

Michael Nygard strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers around the world. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Living with systems in production taught Michael about the importance of operations and writing production-ready software. Highly-available, highly-scalable commerce systems are his forte.

Michael has written and co-authored several books, including 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and the bestseller Release It!, a book about building software that survives the real world. He is a highly sought speaker who addresses developers, architects, and technology leaders around the world.

Michael is currently Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, the company reimagining the business of travel.

 

 

You’ll Learn About:

  • Admiral Rickover’s work with the Naval Nuclear Reactor Core
  • Building great architecture for generality.
  • Architecture as an organizing logic and means of software construction.
  • Toyota Production System’s ability to drive down the cost of change through architecture
  • Clojure programming language
  • Cynefin framework
  • How to know if a code is simpler or more complex

 

RESOURCES



TIMESTAMPS

 

[00:09] Intro

[02:19] Mike’s reflections on Steve Spear, Admiral Rickover and the US Naval reactor core

[04:33] Admiral Rickover’s 1962 memo

[08:13] Cynefin framework

[12:40] Applying to software engineering

[16:06] Gene tells Mike a Steve Spear’s story

[18:58] 10+ deploys a day everyday at Flickr

[19:43] Back to the story

[24:34] Why the story is important

[27:35] When notes are useful

[35:05] Too many notes vs. too few notes

[40:00] DevOps Enterprise Summit Vegas Virtual

[41:35] How to know if a code is simpler or more complex

[47:23] A lively exchange of ideas

[51:31] The opposing argument

[54:20] Implementing items of interests

[55:21] Back to the payment processing example

[56:07] Case 3

[1:03:03] The challenge with Option 2

[1:08:19] Pure function

[1:10:19] Rich Hickey and Clojure

[1:15:01] Rich Hickey’s “Simple Made Easy” presentation

[1:16:37] Exploring those ideas work at the macro scale

[1:22:31] Immutability concept

[1:23:58] The importance of senior leaders’ understanding of these issues

[1:26:53] Outro

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Dispatch from the Scenius: Tempo, Maneuverability, and Initiative Subtitle: Micheal Nygard’s 2016 DevOps Enterprise Summit Presentation with Commentary from Gene Kim

Thursday Aug 27, 2020

Thursday Aug 27, 2020

In the latest Dispatch from the Scenius, Gene Kim provides original commentary on Michael Nygard’s 2016 DevOps Enterprise Summit presentation Tempo, Maneuverability, and Initiative

DevOps has been and continues to be part of a larger shift in organizational structure, system architecture, infrastructure, and process design. In order to be successful, each of these must change together to achieve a high tempo. In this presentation, Nygard talks about maneuverability and how to get teams, and teams of teams, working toward a common objective. And he provides principles and patterns for how large organizations can overcome the pitfalls they so often face.

In this presentation, Nygard provides several real-life examples of failed and successful transformation efforts through a lens of tempo, maneuver warfare, and initiative.

 

Bio:

Michael Nygard strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers around the world. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Living with systems in production taught Michael about the importance of operations and writing production-ready software. Highly-available, highly-scalable commerce systems are his forte.

Michael has written and co-authored several books, including 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and the bestseller Release It!, a book about building software that survives the real world. He is a highly sought speaker who addresses developers, architects, and technology leaders around the world.

Michael is currently Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, the company reimagining the business of travel.

You’ll Learn About:

  • John Boyd’s energy maneuverability theory and maneuver warfare
  • Architect elevator
  • Edge of Instability
  • Disposable infrastructure
  • Horizontal and vertical integrity

RESOURCES

TIMESTAMPS

[00:07] Intro

[01:20] Mike Nygard’s speech

[02:29] A story of despair and hope

[03:55] Gene explains the joke

[04:15] Back to Mike’s story

[09:17] Military concept: manoeuvrability

[14:12] Architect Elevator

[16:50] Edge of Instability

[17:55] DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020

[19:32] War of attrition

[20:47] Disposable infrastructure

[22:59] Studying tempo

[24:57] Horizontal and vertical integrity

[28:52] What is the intent

[32:44] Gene’s last observations

[36:46] Outro

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Architecture as the Organizing Logic for Components, and the Means for their Construction with Michael Nygard

Thursday Aug 13, 2020

Thursday Aug 13, 2020

In the latest episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim is joined by Michael Nygard, a senior vice president at Sabre and author of the bestselling Release It! Nygard has helped businesses and technology leaders in their transformation journeys over his long career and was even one of the inspirations behind The Unicorn Project’s protagonist, Maxine.

 

In their discussion, Kim and Nygard explore how we can enable thousands or even tens of thousands of engineers to work together toward common objectives, including the structure and dynamics required to achieve it. They also examine what truly great architecture looks like and the continuing importance and relevance of Conway’s Law.

 

Bio:

Michael Nygard strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers around the world. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Living with systems in production taught Michael about the importance of operations and writing production-ready software. Highly-available, highly-scalable commerce systems are his forte.

Michael has written and co-authored several books, including 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and the bestseller Release It!, a book about building software that survives the real world. He is a highly sought speaker who addresses developers, architects, and technology leaders around the world.

Michael is currently Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, the company reimagining the business of travel.

 



You’ll Learn About:

  • How to build great architecture for large teams.
  • The real implications of Conway’s Law.
  • Architecture as an organizing logic and means of software construction.
  • Real-life stories of technology leaders’ transformation journeys.
  • Decentralized economic decision making.
  • The fear cycle and predictability.
  • The after effects of the Yegge memo.
  • A great definition of what great architecture is. 
  • Leadership and the relationship between the business’ architecture and the technology architecture of the business.

RESOURCES

 

TIMESTAMPS

 

[00:07] Intro

[02:12] Meet Mike Nygard

[04:36] What is TPF operating system?

[05:40] Finding the perspective to write Release It!

[11:07] Totality Corporation

[13:54] Moving large teams towards common objective

[18:37] Decentralized economic decision making

[19:52] The Principles of Product Development Flow

[23:38] Tale of two outages

[27:27] Distance incentive supply

[32:00] Architecture is one top predictors of performance

[35:05] Other attributes of good architecture

[39:19] The Fear Cycle

[43:40] An amazing finding in State of DevOps Report

[45:02] Amazon replatforming example

[50:35] The universal takeaways

[53:07] DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020

[54:55] Characteristics of reorganizations and structural changes

[1:00:00] Self-contained systems

[1:02:40] Mike’s definition of architecture

[1:07:13] Coherence Penalty for Humans

[1:10:10] Leadership’s responsibility to the architecture

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The Topography of Problems, and the Importance of Distributed Problem Solving with Dr. Steve Spear

Thursday Jul 30, 2020

Thursday Jul 30, 2020

In this bonus follow-up interview, Gene Kim and Dr. Steve Spear dig into what makes for great leadership today, including the importance of distributed decision-making and problem-solving. They showcase the real advantages of allowing more decisions to be made by the people closest to the work, who are the most suited to solve them.

 

Dr. Spear also shares his personal accounts of the honorable Paul O’Neill, the late CEO of Alcoa who built an incredible culture of safety and performance during his tenure. And Kim and Spear dive deeper into the structure and dynamics of the famous MIT beer game.

 

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System.  A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so they know better faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple “verticals” including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, Army rapid equipping, and Navy readiness.  

High velocity learning concepts became the basis of the Alcoa Business System—which led to 100s of millions in recurring savings, the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiatives “Perfecting Patient Care System”—credited with sharp reductions in complications like MRSA and CLABs, Pratt & Whitney’s “Engineering Standard Work”—which when piloted led to winning the engine contract for the Joint Strike Fighter, the operating system for Detroit Edison, and the Navy’s high velocity learning line of effort—an initiative led by the Chief of Naval Operations. A pilot with a pharma company cut the time for the ‘hit to lead’ phase in early stage drug discovery from twelve months to six.

Spear has published in Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, Health Services Research, Harvard Business Review, Academic Administrator, and the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings He invented the patented See to Solve Real Time Alert System and is principal investigator for new research on making critical decisions when faced with hostile data.  He’s supervised more than 40 theses and dissertations. He holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton and worked at the University of Tokyo, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment and Prudential Bache.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stevespear

Email: steve@hvellc.com

Website: thehighvelocityedge.com

 

You’ll Learn About:

  • Distributed decision-making
  • Developing group leader core
  • Safety culture at ALCOA
  • The need for specialization in an increasingly complex world
  • MIT beer game
  • Feedback builds trust

Episode Timeline:

  • [00:10] Intro
  • [01:36] Limitations of the leader
  • [08:03] Taking the Moses example to the assembly line at Toyota
  • [11:12] Developing group leader core
  • [13:32] Back to the Moses problem
  • [14:19] Gene’s two thoughts
  • [16:01] Planet Money’s SUMMER SCHOOL 2: Markets & Pickles
  • [18:38] An Excerpt from The DevOps Handbook
  • [20:57] Paul O’Neill’s job to set standards
  • [22:35] Elements of rugged topography
  • [23:37] Sponsored ad: DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual
  • [24:39] Setting context
  • [25:30] The structure and resulting dynamics
  • [28:00] Call it out early and often
  • [30:45] Making everyone feel responsible
  • [36:51] Safety culture at ALCOA
  • [37:33] “If there’s a failure, it’s my failure”
  • [38:52] Topography of the problem
  • [42:27] Applying to the car example
  • [46:50] Benefits of specialization in modern medicine
  • [50:37] Complexity will keep increasing as time goes by or is it reduced?
  • [52:31] The need for specialization will continue to grow
  • [53:22] MIT Beer Game through the lens of structure and dynamics
  • [1:00:14] Feedback builds trust
  • [1:01:21] Dirty Harry’s final scene
  • [1:03:08] Outro

Resources:

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(Dispatch from the Scenius) Dr. Steve Spear’s 2019 and 2020 DOES Talks on Rapid, Distributed, Dynamic Learning

Thursday Jul 23, 2020

Thursday Jul 23, 2020

In the latest Dispatch from the Scenius, Gene Kim brings you two of Dr. Steve Spear’s DevOps Enterprise Summit presentations in their entirety.

 

In Spear’s 2019 presentation, “Discovering Your Way to Greatness: How Finding and Fixing Faults is the Path to Perfection,” he talks about the need and the value of finding faults in our thinking that result in faults in our doing. 

 

Spear continues to explore this lesson in his 2020 presentation about the US Navy 100 years ago, when they were at a crucial inflection point in both technology and strategic mission. It is one of the most remarkable examples of creating distributed learning in a vast enterprise. 

 

As always, Gene provides exclusive commentary to the presentations.



ABOUT THE GUESTS

 

Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System.  A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so they know better faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple “verticals” including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, Army rapid equipping, and Navy readiness.

  

High velocity learning concepts became the basis of the Alcoa Business System—which led to 100s of millions in recurring savings, the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiatives “Perfecting Patient Care System”—credited with sharp reductions in complications like MRSA and CLABs, Pratt & Whitney’s “Engineering Standard Work”—which when piloted led to winning the engine contract for the Joint Strike Fighter, the operating system for Detroit Edison, and the Navy’s high velocity learning line of effort—an initiative led by the Chief of Naval Operations. A pilot with a pharma company cut the time for the ‘hit to lead’ phase in early stage drug discovery from twelve months to six.

 

Spear has published in Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, Health Services Research, Harvard Business Review, Academic Administrator, and the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings He invented the patented See to Solve Real Time Alert System and is principal investigator for new research on making critical decisions when faced with hostile data.  He’s supervised more than 40 theses and dissertations. He holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton and worked at the University of Tokyo, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment and Prudential Bache.

 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stevespear

Email: steve@hvellc.com

Website: thehighvelocityedge.com

 

You’ll Learn About:

  • The dire consequences when traditional retailers were late creating competitive eCommerce capabilities.
  • Creating dynamic learning organizations.
  • How fast feedback creates opportunities to self correct and improve in real time
  • How the US Navy’s Battle of Midway compares to how organizations are responding to digital disruption today.

Episode Timeline:

  • [00:10] Intro
  • [01:23] Dr. Steve Spear’s speech
  • [01:44] What did I accomplish?
  • [02:39] What did I discover today?
  • [03:45] Start point with ignorance
  • [05:21] High velocity learning
  • [06:52] Courtney Kissler and Nordstrom
  • [08:09] Steve’s examples of finding a potential solution
  • [18:53] The Machine That Changed the World 
  • [19:57] High velocity learning is mother of all solutions
  • [23:13] Shattered Sword
  • [29:45] Homework: Garner feedback and make it better
  • [30:59] The importance of high velocity outcomes
  • [35:06] Steve’s ask for help
  • [37:37] See to Solve
  • [38:30] Steve’s presentation at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020
  • [45:34] Digital disruption
  • [47:17] Bringing the whole Navy to solve the problem
  • [50:00] Combat information center
  • [53:30] Greyhound
  • [54:48] Innovation across a group of ships
  • [58:47] Back to Midway
  • [1:01:23] Contrast between Japanese’s and American’s Naval doctrine plans
  • [1:04:17] Steve’s last encouragement
  • [1:04:32] Gene’s two observations
  • [1:08:32] Outro

RESOURCES

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