• The Principles and Practices Behind Team of Teams
    Oct 1 2020

    In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim sits down with Team of Team’s coauthor and CEO of Crosslead, David Silverman, and Director of Research and Development at CrossLead, Jessica Reif, for a two-part interview. 

    In Team of Teams, David and his coauthors explained how the Joint Special Forces Task Force in Iraq was struggling to achieve its mission, and how they turned it into a success. Their experience led to a deep and critical rethinking of almost everything in US military services and in the commercial industry. Now at CrossLead, David works with Jessica Reif to continue researching and codifying these practices into their management framework.

    In Part 1 of the interview, Gene and his guests discuss the structure and dynamics of the transformation described in Team of Teams and how these leadership characteristics are needed today in the new ways of working. This leadership framework reinforces the concepts of common purpose, shared consciousness, empowerment, and trust within organizations to help teams work together more effectively in complex environments, particularly when they have to continuously adapt to change. Stay tuned for Part 2.

     

    BIO:

    David Silverman

    Entrepreneur, bestselling author, and former Navy SEAL, David Silverman is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CrossLead, Inc. Founded in 2016, CrossLead is a technology company whose leadership and management framework is used by leaders and companies around the globe.  

    In 2015, David co-authored the New York Times bestselling leadership and management book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. As a thought leader on culture change, high-performing teams, and leadership, he is a frequent guest speaker for business leaders and conferences around the globe.

    After his 13-year career as a Navy SEAL, David and a group of like-minded friends sought to reinvent the way the world does business in today’s dynamic environment. Based on their collective service in the world’s premier Special Operations Units, they devised a holistic leadership and management framework called CrossLead. Today, CrossLead is a leading framework for scaling agile practices across the enterprise. Implemented in some of the world’s most successful organizations, CrossLead drives faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in productivity, improvement in employee engagement, and more predictable business results. 

    Prior to CrossLead, David co-founded the McChrystal Group where he served as CEO for five years. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, David served as a Navy SEAL from 1998-2011. He graduated Basic Underwater Demolition School (BUD/S) Class 221 in 1999 as the Honor Man. David deployed six times around the world, including combat deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia where he received three Bronze Stars and numerous other commendations. 

    David serves on the advisory board of the Headstrong Project and is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization. David lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Hollis, and their two children. He maintains an active lifestyle as a waterman and runner.  

    Twitter: @dksilverman

    Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-silverman-648035a/

    Website: https://www.crosslead.com/

    Jess Reif                                                                                       

    Jessica Reif is the Director of Research & development for CrossLead Inc, where she leverages the latest management research to develop new approaches to increasing business agility for CrossLead’s clients. She leads CrossLead’s education efforts and has developed training programs that have been delivered to over 20,000 leaders. Previously, Jessica served as a ...

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    1 hr and 44 mins
  • Behind The State of DevOps Research, Favorite Aha Moments, and Where They Are Now: Interviews with The DevOps Handbook Coauthors (Part 2 of 2: Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble)
    Jan 27 2022
    In part two of this two-part episode on The DevOpsHandbook, Second Edition, Gene Kim speaks with coauthors Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble about the past and current state of DevOps. Forsgren and Humble share with Kim their DevOps aha moments and what has been the most interesting thing they’ve learned since the book was released in 2016. Jez discusses the architectural properties of the programming language PHP and what it has in common with ASP.NET. He also talks about the anguish he felt when Mike Nygard’s book, Release It!, was published while he was working on his book, Continuous Delivery. Forsgren talks about how it feels to see the findings from the State of DevOps research so widely used and cited within the technology community. She explains the importance of finding the link between technology performance and organizational performance as well as what she's learned about the importance of culture and how it can make or break an organization. Humble, Forsgren, and Kim each share their favorite case studies in The DevOps Handbook. ABOUT THE GUEST(S) Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble are two of five coauthors of The DevOps Handbook along with Gene Kim, Patrick Debois and John Willis. Forsgren, PhD, is a Partner at Microsoft Research. She is coauthor of the Shingo Publication Award-winning book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and The DevOps Handbook, 2nd Ed., and is best known as lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been a successful entrepreneur (with an exit to Google), professor, performance engineer, and sysadmin. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals. Humble is co-author of Lean Enterprise, the Jolt Award-winning Continuous Delivery, and The DevOps Handbook. He has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents, most recently working for the US Federal Government at 18F. As well as serving as DORA’s CTO, Jez teaches at UC Berkeley. YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT Projects Jez and Gene worked on together before The DevOps Handbook came out.What life is like for Jez as a site reliability engineer at Google and what he’s learned.The story behind his DevOps aha moment in 2004, working on a large software project involving 70 developers.The architectural properties of his favorite programming language PHP, what it has in common with ASP.NET, and the importance of being able to get fast feedback while building something.The anguish that Jez felt when Mike Nygard’s book, Release It!, came out, wondering if there was still a need for the book he was working on, which was Continuous Delivery.“Testing on the Toilet” and other structures for creating distributed learning across an organization and why this is important to create a genuine learning dynamic.What Dr. Forsgren is working on now as Partner of Microsoft Research.Some of Dr. Forsgren’s goals as we work together on the State of DevOps research and how it feel to have those findings so widely used and cited within the technology community.The importance of finding the link between technology performance and organizational performance and why it probably was so elusive for at least 40 years in the research community.What Dr. Forsgren has learned about the importance of culture, how it can make or break an organization, and the importance of great leadership. RESOURCES Personal DevOps Aha Moments, the Rise of Infrastructure, and the DevOps Enterprise Scenius: Interviews with The DevOps Handbook Coauthors (Part 1 of 2: Patrick Debois and John Willis)The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, Second Edition, by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Jez Humble, and Dr. Nicole ForsgrenNudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. SunsteinNudge vs Shove: A Conversation With Richard ThalerThe Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps by Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and George SpaffordFlowConElisabeth Hendrickson on the Idealcast: Part 1, Part 2Cloud RunBeyond Goldilocks Reliability by Narayan Desai, GoogleContinuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble and David FarleyRelease It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael T. NygardDevOps DaysOn the Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles by Elisabeth Hendrickson at FlowCon San Francisco 2013Bret VictorInventing on Principle by Bret VictorMedia for Thinking the UnthinkableDouglas Engelbart and The Mother of All Demos18FPain Is Over, If You Want It at DevOps Enterprise Summit - San Francisco 2015Goto Fail, Heartbleed, and Unit Testing Culture by Mike BlandDo Developers Discover New Tools On The Toilet? by Emerson Murphy-Hill, Edward Smith, Caitlin Sadowski, Ciera Jaspan, Collin Winter, Matthew Jorde, Andrea...
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    1 hr and 30 mins