The Phoenix Project Quotes

“We also have all the calls going into the service desk, whether it’s requests for something new or asking to fix something. But that list will be incomplete, too, because so many people in the business just go to their favorite it person. All that work is completely off the books.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I’ve long believed that to effectively manage it is not only a critical competency but a significant predictor of company performance,” he explains. “One of these days, I’d like to create a hedge fund that invests in companies, taking long positions on companies with great it organizations that help the business win, and short the companies where it lets everyone down. I think we’d make a killing. What better way is there to force the next generation of ceos to give a shit about it?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Who’s been calling you, and what do they want?” I ask, frowning. “Usually it’s other it people who are having problems fixing something,” he replies, rolling his eyes. “When something goes down, I’m apparently the only person who knows where to go looking.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“One is that it matters. it is not just a department that I can delegate away. it is smack in the middle of every major company effort we have and is critical to almost every aspect of daily operations.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“To tell the truth is an act of love. To withhold the truth is an act of hate. Or worse, apathy.” I had laughed at those words at the time, but over the years, I’ve realized that having people give you honest feedback is a rare gift.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Lean principles focus on how to create value for the customer through systems thinking by creating constancy of purpose, embracing scientific thinking, creating flow and pull (versus push), assuring quality at the source, leading with humility, and respecting every individual.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Paige might be able to stop working. But is it worth having to deal with”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“not complaining. I don’t want to wreck”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“preoccupied by work.” I start to apologize, but she cuts me off.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Even though I can’t take the entire day off, I”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“As the saying goes, if your colleague tells you they’ve decided to quit, it was voluntary. But when someone else tells you they’ve decided to quit, it was mandatory.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“but to keep your head low enough to avoid the political battles that make you inherently vulnerable. I have absolutely no interest in becoming one of the vps who just give each other PowerPoints all day long.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I’ve figured out that the trick to a long career in it Operations management is to get enough seniority to get good things done”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“In addition to the human suffering that comes with the current way of working, the opportunity cost of the value that we could be creating is staggering—the authors believe that we are missing out on approximately $2.6 trillion of value creation per year,”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Studies have shown that practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“the leader’s role is to create the conditions so their team can discover greatness in their daily work.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Brent is very unique. Unicorn needs someone who has the respect of the developers, has enough deep experience with almost every sort of it infrastructure we have, and can describe what the developers need to build so that we can actually manage and operate in production. Those skills are rare, and we don’t have anyone else that can rotate into this special role right now.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Unlike the other categories of work, unplanned work is recovery work, which almost always takes you away from your goals. That’s why it’s so important to know where your unplanned work is coming from.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“we are all lifelong learners who must take risks in our daily work.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“we are starting to master the First Way: We’re curbing the handoffs of defects to downstream work centers, managing the flow of work, setting the tempo by our constraints, and, based on our results from audit and from Dick, we’re understanding better than we ever have what is important versus what is not.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“As part of the First Way, you must gain a true understanding of the business system that it operates in.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“four types of work: business projects, it Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Every company is a technology company, regardless of what business they think they’re in. A bank is just an IT company with a banking license.”†”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“It stands to reason that if it is organized so that it can win, the business wins, too.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Information Security is always flashing their badges at people and making urgent demands, regardless of the consequences to the rest of the organization, which is why we don’t invite them to many meetings. The best way to make sure something doesn’t get done is to have them in the room.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“A developer jamming in an urgent change so he could go on vacation—possibly as part of some urgent project being driven by John Pesche, our Chief Information Security Officer. Situations like this only reinforce my deep suspicion of developers: They’re often carelessly breaking things and then disappearing, leaving Operations to clean up the mess.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Well, now that you mention it…”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“What that graph says is that everyone needs idle time, or slack time. If no one has slack time, wip gets stuck in the system. Or more specifically, stuck in queues, just waiting.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“handing me a Post-it note with all of Dick’s contact information. Office location, phone numbers,”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Patty snaps, “That’s crap, and you know it. Your people routinely break the rules. Like, say, when everyone marks all their change requests as an ‘urgent’ or ‘emergency change’. That field is only for actual emergencies!” Wes retorts, “We have to do that, because marking them urgent is the only way to get your team to look at it! Who can wait three weeks for an approval?” One of the lead engineers suggests, “Maybe we make another field called ‘extremely urgent?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win