Gemba Sprints

If teams are self-managed, why have managers at all? Why not do what Google’s Larry and Sergey did in 2001 and fire them all? They believed that smart engineers would “figure it out.”

The agile movement also naively dismisses the importance of management and, in some cases, even demonizes them. Many are waking up to the criticality of management, to the success and failure of transformation efforts. In fact Larry and Sergey rehired managers a year later, after speaking to their engineers.

The real culprit behind the issues the product development industry is facing is neither managers nor teams, but an organizational design that is incompatible with knowledge work. Behavioral changes are required on all sides: teams, management, and senior leadership.

To catalyze this change, an experiment is started with senior leadership, called the Gemba Sprint (‘gemba’ being Japanese for ‘the actual place’).

This session is meant to serve as an introduction to the idea of Gemba Sprint as well as leaving plenty of time for your Q and A.