Lean Enterprise Quotes

“Instead of creating controls to compensate for pathological cultures, the solution is to create a culture in which people take responsibility for the consequences of their actions”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“The long-term value of an enterprise is not captured by the value of its products and intellectual property but rather by its ability to continuously increase the value it provides to customers — and to create new customers — through innovation.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“There are two rules of thumb architects follow when decomposing systems. First, ensure that adding a new feature tends to change only one service or a component at a time. This reduces interface churn.6 Second, avoid “chatty” or fine-grained communication between services. Chatty services scale poorly and are harder to impersonate for testing purposes.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“In his revolutionary work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1970, Paulo Freire describes what is still the dominant model of teaching today. In this model, students are viewed as empty “bank accounts” to be filled with knowledge by teachers — not as participants who have a say in what and how they learn. This model is not designed to enable students to learn — especially not to learn to think for themselves — but rather to control the learning process, students’ access to information, and their ability to critically analyze it. In this way, the education system perpetuates existing social structures and power hierarchies.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“In reality, however, this type of command and control has not been fashionable in military circles since 1806 when the Prussian Army, a classic plan-driven organization, was decisively defeated by Napoleon’s decentralized, highly motivated forces. Napoleon used a style of war known as maneuver warfare to defeat larger, better-trained armies. In maneuver warfare, the goal is to minimize the need for actual fighting by disrupting your enemy’s ability to act cohesively through the use of shock and surprise. A key element in maneuver warfare is being able to learn, make decisions, and act faster than your enemy — the same capability that allows startups to disrupt enterprises.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“In a survey of 161 global business decision makers shown in Figure 2-6, only 24% of respondents reported using an economic model to make investment decisions in products and services. Astonishingly, 13% admitted that the most highly paid person’s opinion (known as the HiPPO method) is the primary deciding factor.15 47% reported using the only slightly less embarrassing method of decision by committee.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

“We should explore and experiment with radical process changes — known as kaikaku in Lean terminology — in the same way we explore potential new business models. That is, we should try them out with a relatively small, cross-functional part of the organization, with people that fall in the “innovator” category. These people must be interested in the proposed process experiments and have the necessary skills to run them.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

“The key to creating a lean enterprise is to enable those doing the work to solve their customers’ problems in a way that is aligned with the strategy of the wider”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

“organization. To achieve this, we rely on people being able to make local decisions that are sound at a strategic level — which, in turn, relies critically on the flow of information, including feedback loops.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

“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.4”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

“To achieve this, we rely on people being able to make local decisions that are sound at a strategic level — which, in turn, relies critically on the flow of information, including feedback loops.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

“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

“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

“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. Friedrich Nietzsche”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“People with a fixed mindset fear failure as they believe it makes their innate limitations visible to others, whereas those with a growth mindset are less risk averse by seeing failure as an opportunity to learn and develop new skills.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“As discussed in Chapter 2, data gathered from A/B tests by Ronny Kohavi, who directed Amazon’s Data Mining and Personalization group before joining Microsoft as General Manager of its Experimentation Platform, reveal that 60%–90% of ideas do not improve the metric they were intended to improve. Thus if we’re not running experiments to test the value of new ideas before completely developing them, the chances are that about 2/3 of the work we are doing is of either zero or negative value to our customers — and certainly of negative value to our organization, since this work costs us in three ways. In addition to the cost of developing the features, there is an opportunity cost associated with more valuable work we could have done instead, and the cost of the new complexity they add to our systems (which manifests itself as the cost of maintaining the code, a drag on the rate at which we can develop new functionality, and often, reduced operational stability and performance).”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“In most enterprises, around 30%–50% of the total time to market is spent on activity which provides almost zero value in terms of mitigating the risks of our investments. This”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Astonishingly, 13% admitted that the most highly paid person’s opinion (known as the HiPPO method) is the primary deciding factor.15 47% reported using the only slightly less embarrassing method of decision by committee.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Enterprises that use design thinking and user experience (UX) design strategically to delight customers at each step of their interaction with the organization have thrived: research shows companies which apply UX design in this way experience faster growth and higher revenues.2”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“true agility means that teams are constantly working to evolve their processes to deal with the particular obstacles they are facing at any given time.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Mission Command embraces a conception of leadership which unsentimentally places human beings at its center. It crucially depends on factors which do not appear on the balance sheet of an organization: the willingness of people to accept responsibility; the readiness of their superiors to back up their decisions; the tolerance of mistakes made in good faith. Designed for an external environment which is unpredictable and hostile, it builds on an internal environment which is predictable and supportive. At its heart is a network of trust binding people together up, down, and across a hierarchy. Achieving and maintaining that requires constant work.15”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“no plan survives contact with the enemy,”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“The elements of a suitable product-centric paradigm that works at scale have all emerged in the last 10 years, but they have not yet been connected and presented in a systematic way.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“By keeping our initial customer base small — not chasing vanity numbers to get too big too fast — we force ourselves to keep it simple and maintain close contact with our customers every step of the way.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Don’t slow down delivery. Decide, when needed, at the right level. Do it with the right people. Go see for yourself. Only do it if it adds value. Trust and verify.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Such programs fail to recognize that turning innovation or change into an event rather than part of our daily work can never produce significant or lasting results.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Product people become judged on their ability to create comprehensive specification documents and well-crafted business cases, not on whether the products and features they come up with deliver value to users.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things. Peter Drucker Shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world…[it is] a result, not a strategy…Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products.1 Jack Welch”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean