All in culture

We all make mistakes - big and small. But what do we do with them? How do we react? How do the people around us react? Mark Graban’s latest book, The Mistakes that Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation is an interesting combination of anecdotes from his My Favorite Mistake podcast along with guidance on developing the environment where making mistakes is an opportunity to learn and grow.

Ken Blanchard’s High Five is a blast from the past. It was published in 2001, on the heels of several popular management books like Raving Fans and The One Minute Manager and Gung Ho! They are all based around “common sense” ideas that might not be terribly common practice. High Five is about creating teams that perform at top levels, and there are plenty of folksy aphorisms peppered throughout the book.

Trust impacts almost any initiative, whether that is relatively small local efforts or big organizational changes. Jamie Flinchbaugh has been thinking about the topic, and doing some of his own research recently. He’s come up with The 4Cs of Trust: Demonstration of Care, Communication, Competence, and Consistency.

Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby’s new book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams is a fairly quick read, loaded with guidance and recommendations for teams that aren’t co-located apply the Agile Software Development principles. They even carve out specific instances of the principles as applied to distributed agile teams.

The (Australian) Financial Review has a list of 12 things that kill innovation in your organization. For people that pay attention to this space, the entries should sound familiar: A culture of fear, Lack of meaningful mission and vision, Too much hierarchy, Old-School HR practices, The blame game, Overly prescriptive job design, Filtering, Micromanagement, Lone wolf thinking, Silos, Low autonomy, Dissatisfaction