Pirmin > Pirmin's Quotes

“Generous and authentic leadership will always defeat the selfish efforts of someone doing it just because she can.”
― Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

“People who struggle with kaizen do so not because the steps are hard but because they are easy. They can’t overcome the cultural training that says change must always be instantaneous, it must always require steely self-discipline, and it must never be pleasurable.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“Too many production systems are like Schrodinger’s cat—locked inside a box, with no way to observe its actual state.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“Most software is designed for the development lab or the testers in the Quality Assurance (QA) department.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“Release is the beginning of the software’s true life; everything before that release is gestation. Either systems grow over time, adapting to their changing environment, or they decay until their costs outweigh their benefits and then die.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“If your status quo is driving people, your efforts to build trust will be undermined. Trust and driving people cannot coexist. If trust is the end you desire, then driving change must be the means.”
― April K. Mills, Everyone is a Change Agent: A Guide to the Change Agent Essentials

“When someone is driving people, they are assuming they cannot trust their colleagues to accept a change without force or rewards.”
― April K. Mills, Everyone is a Change Agent: A Guide to the Change Agent Essentials

“Driving Change is choosing a change for yourself, acting to create it, and clearing the obstacles for others to join you and change themselves.”
― April K. Mills, Everyone is a Change Agent: A Guide to the Change Agent Essentials

“I want Change A. Somebody must create Change A. I am somebody. I can start today.”
― April K. Mills, Everyone is a Change Agent: A Guide to the Change Agent Essentials

“When you drive people, they shrink. They hide. It dulls their ability to choose, think, or act. They cower. They wait.”
― April K. Mills, Everyone is a Change Agent: A Guide to the Change Agent Essentials

“Don’t assume you are the first person to want to work on your project.”
― April K. Mills, Everyone is a Change Agent: A Guide to the Change Agent Essentials

“The transparency and sharing of a truly fantastic team threatens structures rooted in secrets and obfuscation.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things. Peter Drucker”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Giving people pride in their work rather than trying to motivate them with carrots and sticks is an essential element of a high-performance culture.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“A useful rule of thumb: Whenever you cannot describe the vision driving a change initiative in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest, you are in for trouble.”
― John P. Kotter, Leading Change

“In a less competitive and slower-moving world, weak committees can help organizations adapt at an acceptable rate. A committee makes recommendations. Key line managers reject most of the ideas. The group offers additional suggestions. The line moves another inch. The committee tries again. When both competition and technological change are limited, this approach can work. But in a faster-moving world, the weak committee always fails.”
― John P. Kotter, Leading Change

“A guiding coalition with good managers but poor leaders will not succeed. A managerial mindset will develop plans, not vision; it will vastly undercommunicate the need for and direction of change; and it will control rather than empower people.”
― John P. Kotter, Leading Change

“A guiding coalition made up only of managers—even superb managers who are wonderful people—will cause major change efforts to fail.”
― John P. Kotter, Leading Change

“At senior levels in most organizations, people have large egos. But unless they also have a realistic sense of their weaknesses and limitations, unless they can appreciate complementary strengths in others, and unless they can subjugate their immediate interests to some greater goal, they will probably contribute about as much to a guiding coalition as does nuclear waste. If such a person is the central player in the coalition, you can usually kiss teamwork and a dramatic transformation good-bye.”
― John P. Kotter, Leading Change

“When people fail to develop the coalition needed to guide change, the most common reason is that down deep they really don’t think a transformation is necessary or they don’t think a strong team is needed to direct the change. Skill at team building is rarely the central problem.”
― John P. Kotter, Leading Change

“The typical goal that binds individuals together on guiding change coalitions is a commitment to excellence, a real desire to make their organizations perform to the very highest levels possible. Reengineering, acquisitions, and cultural change efforts often fail because that desire is missing. Instead, one finds people committed to their own departments, divisions, friends, or careers.”
― John P. Kotter, Leading Change

“There is almost no human action or decision that cannot be made to look flawed and less sensible in the misleading light of hindsight. It is essential that the critic should keep himself constantly aware of that fact.”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability

“The moral of the story, borne out in the data, is this: improvements in software delivery are possible for every team and in every company, as long as leadership provides consistent support— including time, actions, and resources—demonstrating a true commitment to improvement, and as long as team members commit themselves to the work.”
― Nicole Forsgren, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

“As Deming said, ’whenever there is fear, you get the wrong numbers”
― Nicole Forsgren, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

“Do change management boards actually improve delivery performance?” (Spoiler alert: they do not; they are negatively correlated with tempo and stability.)”
― Nicole Forsgren, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

“we also discovered that it is possible to influence and improve culture by implementing DevOps practices.”
― Nicole Forsgren, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

“Westrum’s theory posits that organizations with better information flow function more effectively.”
― Nicole Forsgren, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

“we hypothesized that implementing CD would influence organizational culture. Our analysis shows that this is indeed the case. If you want to improve your culture, implementing CD practices will help.”
― Nicole Forsgren, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

“Our research also found that developing off trunk/master rather than on long-lived feature branches was correlated with higher delivery performance.”
― Nicole Forsgren, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

“Teams that did well had fewer than three active branches at any time, their branches had very short lifetimes (less than a day) before being merged into trunk and never had “code freeze” or stabilization periods.”
― Nicole Forsgren, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations