Tag Archives: New York City

My one and only 9-11 post

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My wife is reading from her diary for the week leading up to September 11, 2001.

World Trade Center was hosting a dance series. We saw Twyla Tharp and Ballet Trockadero on separate evenings.

Our one year old loved to walk around the courtyard, up and over benches circling the fountain and the globe at its center.

The underground shops and the Borders Books in building 5 were pleasant retreats from the late summer heat. On Sept 9th, I bought a shirt from the Warners Bros. Store in the World Trade Center shops with Wiley Coyote poised to plunge the switch on a bundle of dynamite.

You could get vertigo by pressing your back against the side of one of the towers and looking up. Nothing so tall was ever so flat. No edge to the sky was ever so perpendicular. The towers were not beautiful. They weren’t natural. But they were a force of mankind and beauty flowed through, around and above them.

I’m speaking at Agile NYC on May 12th

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I have a week to prepare for this month’s APLN-NY which now goes by the zazzy name “Agile New York City”.

Last month, I was the last minute replacement for the planned speaker until the planned venue fell through. So this month, I am the scheduled speaker. This lends an air of improvisation to the event.

Right now, I am a year and a half into my current job and locked in the kind of agile adoption I’ve only presented with hindsight. Right now, I am about the day to day: acknowledging incremental progress, working through setbacks and full of my own limitations. I don’t know the ending. What I feel is an urgency to do better and be better.

So, I worked out the topic over some e-mail exchanges with Jochen Krebs. In the absence of a story to tell, it’s time to do a little a personal retrospection.

Instilling Agile Values for Creativity, Self-Improvement and Organizational Change – A Manager’s Perspective

The scale and speed of an agile adoption are external measures that don’t speak to the founding values of the practice. Collective ownership, continuous improvement and high trust are hard won, take time and discipline but lead to craftsmanship and joy. They are enabling conditions for innovation and beneficial change.

I will retrospect on my contributions both positive and negative towards cultivating these values in two teams. The first was a practice that matured over four years, led to a new mission for the team and direct collaboration with the founder and CEO. The second, is a new team finding its way at the end of its first year.

What will I do more off? What will I do less of? What impediments got in the way?