A Seat at the Table Quotes

“Risk is managed not through cautious planning but through bold experiments combined with frequent inspection, feedback, and adaptation.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Surprisingly, this divergence continues despite the deep influence of Agile and Lean thinking on general—that is, non-IT—management. The disciplines continue to evolve separately even though corporate strategy is increasingly about both agility and IT strategy. The two worlds do not converge, even though IT leadership books advise CIOs to pull themselves closer to strategy formulation and claim a “seat at the table.” But while the other C-level executives around the table are discussing the need for agility, senior IT leaders, eager to gain or retain a seat at the strategy table, are pursuing the path of demonstrating the value of IT ... by locking in old-school practices that encourage rigidity.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Impact”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Jeff Patton in User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product,”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Kanban is David Anderson’s”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Donald Reinertsen’s book The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Given the importance of digital technology, and given which companies now serve as role models for executive leadership, it might be that instead of CIOs learning to wear suits, the rest of the executive team should be ready to start dressing down. Or perhaps the business should be learning how to align with IT, rather than the other way around.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“There should just be a team working together to figure out how to maximize business value.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Security is not the guys in the dark glasses with impenetrable network diagrams on their huge computer screens. It is your grandmother telling you that you’d better brush your teeth.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“The IT leader must have the courage to own outcomes.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Agile thinking simply says that we should empower small teams to inspect and adapt rather than stick to a plan. Lean thinking gives that small team ways to speed up its inspecting and adapting process to maximize its impact. Continuous Delivery and DevOps place the entire value stream in the hands of that small team so that it can “optimize the whole” (a term of art in Lean thinking) and be empowered as a team to own the entire value delivery process.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works. —James Joyce, interview”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Obsessed with proving that it deserves a seat at the table, IT leadership continues to frame its problems in the same old ways—oblivious to the deep changes brought on by the Agile revolution—while the Agile world, ever suspicious of management, proceeds as if it can manage without the involvement of IT leaders.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“In the long-distant past, we were taught that IT was the keeper of technology and that IT leaders were service-providers to the rest of the business. Their job was to stay aligned with business strategy, taking orders from the business and delivering new systems. If they kept the systems running and delivered new projects on time, then all was good. That time is over, and has been for many years.25”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“I have discussed the challenge of defining business value in The Art of Business Value; even more challenging in this case is defining what we mean by business value delivered by IT. Business value is delivered by the enterprise with support from IT—IT is part of a whole, a complex system in which its ability to deliver value depends on factors outside of IT. The only way that IT can deliver business value itself is through cost-cutting within the IT cost structure—in all other cases that I can think of, IT is delivering product that might or might not then be used by someone else to deliver business value.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“believe that this is simpler than it sounds. It is about identifying the obstacles in our way and taking today’s best-practice ideas—those found in the Agile Manifesto and in books like Lean Startup, Lean Software Development, Lean Enterprise, The DevOps Handbook, and others on today’s management bookshelves—and applying them to IT leadership.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“My fellow IT leaders, we must use these new Agile, Lean, and DevOps practices as a lever for changing the relationship between IT and the rest of the business. We”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“a way, the Agile community is suffering from the same insecurity as the CIO community. While CIOs feel that they need to justify their existence and claim a seat at the table, the Agile community is stuck on the idea that it has no place until dramatic cultural and organizational changes happen.†”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“There is no a priori reason that IT cannot lead the business’s digital transformation. The fact that organizations widely don’t believe this suggests that there is something wrong with the way we have been defining IT.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“cumulative flow diagrams help us pinpoint process flaws;”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“DevOps simply adds the idea that small, cross-functional teams should own the entire delivery process from concept through user feedback and production monitoring.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility