Making a Huge Company Agile
Want to know what it takes to make a company - like, say, the size of General Electric, or Wal-Mart agile? Look no further than how Jack Welch ran things when he was the CEO of GE for over 2 decades.
I just reading through one of the great books he’s put out, and here are some interesting highlights:
- Embrace Change, Don’t Fear It
- Face Reality, Then Act Decisively
- Don’t Focus on the Numbers
- Be Lean and Agile Like a Small Company
- Tear Down Boundaries
This is really interesting to me, because as a company grows, folks tend to want to start putting in more process and layers of management. While I’m not against having effective process points, I like to think of things more like a framework so people can make their own decisions. Also, creating leaders that are driving home key parts of the business is imperative.
I try to keep my philosophies grounded around similar fundamentals. Not just in product management, but in constantly trying to improve my skill set and contributing as much as possible to the company being successful.
Bring in people that are just really damn good. Provide the tools and skills to help others become really damn good. It’s not beyond a successful leader to do so.
Ensuring that people don’t feel tethered to do whatever “senior management” wants is crucial. Great ideas really can come from anywhere in the business; making sure they are being heard is necessary in order for a company to become truly great.
Being so closely tied to product, it’s easy for me (and others) to become really wrapped up in “roadmaps” and “features” and “action items” and “metrics.” However, while these things can be sexy to talk about, they aren’t the fundamentals of a successful organization.
What’s the most critical part of defining a new product? Identifying the problem that product is going to solve. The same goes for a business.
Identifying the vision for that organization and the objectives that need to be met is 100% critical. Everything else will come after that, including some amazing / lightning bolt ideas. But, everyone has to be dialed-in to that vision. It can sound like rhetoric, but it’s really not.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Always good to hear this advice over and over until its ingrained. Thanks for bringing it back to the top for me today.
November 22nd, 2007 at 8:42 am
I think that if Product Management is positioned correctly - it will help turn a large company from being
non-agile to being agile - Product managers tend to communicate with all the key players in an organisation -
they (we) can be great advocates for agile.
Part #9
The role of the Product Manager in Scrum for more details. Derek