From the Author

Writing on agility,
leadership & the system.

Thoughts on the ideas behind the book — and what it takes to actually build an adaptive organization.

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Latest — October 26, 2026

Does Anyone Actually Use OKRs Properly?

Cascading OKRs sounds tidy, but it treats every team's goal as arithmetic on the one above. Teams do better work when the goals above inspire their OKRs instead of dictating them.

September 30, 2026

Agile Coaching Skills Could've Helped Prevent OpenAI's Sandbox Escapes

An OpenAI agent slipped out of its sandbox through a DNS lookup this month. What it did looks less like a rogue machine and more like a team whose scorecard disagrees with its working agreement.

September 18, 2026

What Is Enough? Keeping Score for Your Investments in Side Projects

My friend Brad keeps a sticky note on his monitor that asks what is enough. It made me look at how I keep score on the side projects that eat my evenings, and why I run two very different kinds of them.

September 7, 2026

We Are All Outsourcing Some of Our Thinking. Where Does It Matter?

I had a strong reaction to how college students are using AI, and almost no reaction at all to my colleagues doing the same thing at work. That gap turned out to be the interesting part.

September 2, 2026

A CIO Told 300 Managers to Stop Pretending. It Was the Best Leadership Move I've Watched.

Most leaders learn to command respect and always have the answer ready. But trust doesn't work that way. Somebody has to offer it first, and the person with the most positional power is the only one who can really afford to.

August 25, 2026

Sometimes Looking Like a Bad Manager Is What Should Get You Promoted

Responsive, decisive, always removing obstacles. Every one of those shows up on a strong performance review, and every one of them may be quietly holding your organization back.

August 23, 2026

AI Will Find Your Bottleneck. You Won't Like Where It Is.

AI is about to speed up delivery. If it still takes your organization hundreds of days to decide what to build and why, a faster build cycle doesn't buy anyone anything.

Everyone Can Name the Build Trap. Almost Nobody Gets Out.

Melissa Perri named the trap and Marty Cagan described the way out. Both of them end up pointing at the same person — the leader who keeps handing down solutions.

AI is not the destination. Neither was agile.

Matt Anderson and I gave talks in different rooms at CincyDeliver and made the same argument from opposite ends. Your agile transformation already told you how ready you are for AI — most companies just never looked at the answer.

Behind the Book: How I Actually Used AI to Write It

The preface says the work was mine. Every author says that. Here is the specific version — including the parts that don't flatter me.

Leaders Need to Model the Right Behaviors. It's the Easy Call, but It's Not the Whole Fix.

HBR is right that senior leaders have to model the right behaviors. But the forums that punish those behaviors are strategy, delivery economics, and org design, and that changes what the ask should be.

How to Tell If Your Agile Transformation Is Quietly Stalling

You can make the teams awesome and get top-down executive support — and still fail to achieve business agility. Here's why, and what leaders need to do differently.