The Idealcast with Gene Kim by IT Revolution

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 Forsgren Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Nudge vs Shove: A Conversation With Richard Thaler The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps by Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and George Spafford FlowCon Elisabeth Hendrickson on the Idealcast: Part 1, Part 2 Cloud Run Beyond Goldilocks Reliability by Narayan Desai, Google Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble and David Farley Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael T. Nygard DevOps Days On the Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles by Elisabeth Hendrickson at FlowCon San Francisco 2013 Bret Victor Inventing on Principle by Bret Victor Media for Thinking the Unthinkable Douglas Engelbart and The Mother of All Demos 18F Pain Is Over, If You Want It at DevOps Enterprise Summit - San Francisco 2015 Goto Fail, Heartbleed, and Unit Testing Culture by Mike Bland Do Developers Discover New Tools On The Toilet? by Emerson Murphy-Hill, Edward Smith, Caitlin Sadowski, Ciera Jaspan, Collin Winter, Matthew Jorde, Andrea Knight, Andrew Trenk and Steve Gross PDF Study: DevOps Can Create Competitive Advantage DevOps Means Business by Nicole Forsgren Velasquez, Jez Humble, Nigel Kersten and Gene Kim Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) on Google Cloud GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public Paul Strassmann The Idealcast with Dr. Ron Westrum: Part 1, Part 2 Building the Circle of Faith: How Corporate Culture Builds Trust at Trajectory Conference 2021 The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter Maslach Burnout Inventory Understanding Job Burnout at DevOps Enterprise Summit - Las Vegas 2018 Understanding Job Burnout at DevOps Enterprise Summit - London 2019 Workplace Engagement Panel at DevOps Enterprise Summit - Las Vegas 2019 Expert Panel - Workplace Engagement & Countering Employee Burnout at DevOps Enterprise Summit - London 2019 The Idealcast with Trent Green Kelly Shortridge’s tweets about Gitlab S-1   TIMESTAMPS [05:22] Intro [05:34] Meet Jez Humble [10:19] What Jez is working on these days [15:56] What inform his book, “Continuous Delivery” [24:02] Assembling the team for the project [26:30] At what point was PHP an important property [31:56] The most surprising thing since the DevOps Handbook came out [35:07] His favorite pattern that went into the DevOps Handbook [43:40] What DevOps worked on in 2021 [44:46] Meet Dr. Nicole Forsgren [50:32] What Dr. Forsgren is working on these days [52:18] What it’s like working at Microsoft Research [55:58] The response to the state of DevOps findings [59:18] The most surprising finding since the findings release [1:05:59] Her favorite pattern that influence performance [1:08:49] How Dr. Forsgren met Dr. Ron Westrum [1:11:06] The most important thing she’s learned in this journey [1:14:46] Her favorite case study in the DevOps Handbook [1:19:12] Dr. Christina Maslach and work burnout [1:20:46] More context about the case studies [1:25:32] The Navy case study [1:29:04] Outro

In part one of this two-part episode on The DevOpsHandbook, Second Edition, Gene Kim speaks with coauthors Patrick Debois and John Willis about the past, present, and future of DevOps. By sharing their personal stories and experiences, Kim, Debois, and Willis discuss the scenius that inspired the book, and why and how the DevOps movement took hold around the world.   They also examine the updated content in the book, including new case studies, updated metrics, and practices. Finally, they each share the new lessons they have learned since writing the handbook and the future challenges they think DevOps professionals need to solve for the future. Kim will conclude the series in Part 2, where he interviews the remaining two coauthors, Jez Humble and Dr. Nicole Forsgren.    ABOUT THE GUEST(S) Patrick Debois is considered to be the godfather of the DevOps movement after he coined the term DevOps accidentally in 2008. Through his work, he creates synergies projects and operations by using Agile techniques in development, project management, and system administration. He has worked in several companies such as Atlassian, Zender, and VRT Media Lab. Currently, he is a Labs Researcher at Synk and an independent IT consultant.   John Willis an author and Senior Director of the Global Transformation Office at Red Hat.. He has been an active force in the IT management industry for over 35 years. Willis’ experience includes being the Director of Ecosystem Development at Docker, the VP of Solutions for Socketplane, the VP of Training and Services at Opscode. He also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award-winning IBM business partner, which specializes in deploying Tivoli technology for the enterprise.    Patrick DeBois and John Willis are two of five coauthors of The DevOps Handbook along with Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Nicole Forsgren, PhD.   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT The DevOps origin story from coining the term, why it took off, to launching the DevOps Days conference as an offshoot of the velocity conference.  How people thought of DevOps when it was first presented (their reactions, their mentalities, and their willingness to adopt it).   What has changed in the DevOps world since the first edition of The DevOps Handbook was published. How the rise of SaaS companies is altering the DevOps world and participating in its evolution, and how building solid relationships with SaaS vendors and communicating comprehensive feedback to them is integral to DevOps.  The significance of speed in changing team dynamics. Why resilient companies like Google and Amazon engineer chaos, and why companies like Toyota are happy when production stoppages happen.   Why you can’t afford to provide a high variety of products if you also offer high product variation.   RESOURCES Get The DevOps Handbook (Second Edition) Nudge vs Shove: A Conversation With Richard Thaler Solaris Zones wiki Agile Conference in Toronto 2008 Sys Advent article: In Defense of the Modern Day JVM (Java Virtual Machine) by Gene Kim Mob programming Breaking Traditional IT Paradigms to... (San Francisco 2015) Crowdsourcing Technology Governance (Las Vegas 2018) Laying Down the Tracks for Technical Change at Comcast (Las Vegas 2020) 10+ Deploys Per Day by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond 10+ Deploys Per Day  How chaos engineering works at Vanguard Patrick DeBois tweet mapping out all the failure modes of an online conference.  Jesse Robins LinkedIn  Jesse Robbins on Twitter How A Hotel Company Ran $30B of Revenue In Containers (Las Vegas 2020) by Dwayne Holmes Google Cloud Certified Fellow Program  Operations is a competitive advantage… (Secret Sauce for Startups!) Love Letter To Conferences (And What Makes Some Truly Amazing) by Gene Kim Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother Profound podcast by John Willis Ben Rockwood on Twitter Luke Kanies on LinkedIn DevOps 2020 - The Next Decade (London 2020) Beyond the Phoenix Project: The Origins and Evolution of DevOps by Gene Kim and John Willis The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox The Convergence Of DevOps Operations as a Strategic Weapon by John Willis Iterative Enterprise SRE Transformation (US 2021)   TIMESTAMPS [00:00] Intro  [01:18] What’s new and improved in the second edition of the DevOps handbook  [03:56] Meet Patrick DeBois [10:35] How faster technology made ideas like DevOps possible [18:11] The myths and inefficiencies of team autonomy [20:04] What the first DevOps days were like [27:59] Different opinions between the dev community and ops community [30:49] Mob programming and the future of collaboration [39:31] Two surprising things Patrick learned about DevOps [47:20] Patrick DeBois’ favorite DevOps patterns  [51:28] How fear of not delivering on time can mask technical errors [59:45] What Patrick DeBois is working on these days [1:04:38] What was expanded in the second edition of the DevOps handbook [1:06:30] How Gene Kim entered the DevOps world.  [1:07:38] Meet John Willis [1:10:42] Why the DevOps movement took off [1:16:00] Mastering production disasters [1:23:32] The birth of the DevOps Days conference [1:37:37] Feelings of belonging and connection in a conference [1:41:29] A few clarifications [1:49:32] Two of the greatest DevOps open spaces [1:52:40] The difference between variety and variation (the cost of knowledge work).  [2:07:12] Why you should want more stoppages in your production line [2:10:16] John Willis’ two favorite DevOps case studies [2:18:55] Outro

In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Scott Havens, who is the Director of Engineering at Wayfair, where he leads Engineering for the Wayfair Fulfillment Network. Havens is a leading proponent of applying functional programming principles to technical and organizational design. Previously, Havens was the architect for Walmart's global omnichannel inventory system, unifying availability and replenishment for the largest company in the world by revenue. Havens shares his views on what makes great architecture great. He details what happened when an API call required 23 other synchronous procedures calls to return a correct answer. He discusses the challenges of managing inventory at Wal-Mart, how one implements event sourcing patterns on that scale, and the functional programming principles that it depends upon. Lastly, he talks about how much category theory you need to know to do functional programming and considerations when creating code in complex systems. Before listening to this interview, please listen to Episode 22, which provides Scott Havens's  2019 DevOps Enterprise Summit talk with commentary from Gene Kim.   ABOUT THE GUEST(S) Scott Havens is a Director of Engineering at Wayfair, where he leads Engineering for the Wayfair Fulfillment Network. Scott cares deeply about scalable data-intensive software systems; he is a leading proponent of applying functional programming principles to technical and organizational design. Previously, Havens was a Director of Engineering at Jet.com and was the architect for Walmart's global omnichannel inventory system, unifying availability and replenishment for the largest company in the world by revenue. In his home life, Havens enjoys good food, good wine, bad movies, and asking his daughter to stop "redecorating" his Minecraft castles, pretty please. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-havens/ Twitter: @ScottHavens Email: scott@sphavens.com   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT His views on what makes great architectures great The details on what happened when an API call requires 23 other synchronous procedures calls to return a correct answer How one implements event sourcing patterns on a large scale, using Wal-Mart as an example, and the functional programming principles it depends upon The challenges of managing inventory at Wal-Mart How much category theory to know to do functional programming   RESOURCES Currying Function composition (computer science) Idempotence Love Letter To Clojure: And A Datomic Experience Report - Gene Kim Side effect (computer science) Functional Geekery Episode 129 – Eric Normand Theory of Functional Programming skill Ruby Conf 12 - Boundaries by Gary Bernhardt Functional Design in Clojure Podcast - Ep 021: Mutate the Internet Lean Summit 2013 - Art Byrne - What does it take to Lead a Lean Turnaround? Thoughts On Functional Programming Podcast - 3 Examples Of Algebraic Thinking CORECURSIVE #050 - Portal Abstractions with Sam Ritchie: How abstract algebra solves data engineering Adam Grant’s tweet about coding   TIMESTAMPS [00:24] Intro [02:23] Meet Scott Havens [03:48] How architecture fits in functional programming [04:48] Event source systems at Wal-Mart  [19:45] The effects and behaviors [22:36] Duality of code and data [26:13] Currying [32:34] How the 23 service teams’s world change [40:56] Hallmarks of great architecture [51:10] How he replaced the dominant architecture at Wal-Mart [56:46] Configurations and speculations with couplings [1:03:51] How can simple systems suffer from problems like this [1:09:11] Idempotence, Clojure and side effect [1:17:01] Issues with switching to event-driven asynchronous architectures [1:25:15] Vast scale in which these organizations operate in [1:29:54] A moment that showed Scott the effects of what he helped create [1:33:51] Onboarding new engineers to the new system [1:45:11] Working in the Windows 3.1 multicast networking group [1:47:32] Reflection on Moda Operandi experience [1:52:11] Advice to someone who wants to replicate Scott’s journey [1:56:17] What to understand about category theory and algebraic thinking [2:01:11] How to contact Scott [2:02:48] Outro

In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim shares and gives commentary on Scott Havens’ talk from the 2019 DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas. Havens is a Director of Engineering at Wayfair, where he leads Engineering for the Wayfair Fulfillment Network. He is a leading proponent of applying functional programming principles to technical and organizational design. Previously, Scott was the architect for Walmart's global omnichannel inventory system, unifying availability and replenishment for the largest company in the world by revenue. In his 2019 DevOps Enterprise Summit talk, Havens highlights functional programming and e-commerce systems work. He also talks about what he did to massively simplify those systems while also making them more testable, reliable, cheaper to operate, and easier to change. Finally, he discusses the implications of using functional programming to change how to design systems and systems of systems on a larger scale.   ABOUT THE GUEST Scott Havens is Director of Engineering at Wayfair, where he leads Engineering for the Wayfair Fulfillment Network. Scott cares deeply about scalable data-intensive software systems. He is a leading proponent of applying functional programming principles to technical and organizational design. Previously, Scott was Director of Engineering at Jet.com and was the architect for Walmart’s global omnichannel inventory system, unifying availability and replenishment for the largest company in the world by revenue. In his home life, Scott enjoys good food, good wine, bad movies, and asking his daughter to stop “redecorating” his Minecraft castles, pretty please.   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-havens/ Twitter: @ScottHavens Email: scott@sphavens.com   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT Functional programming and what it is. How e-commerce systems work. What Havens did to massively simplify those systems while also making them more testable, reliable, cheaper to operate, and easier to change. The implications of using functional programming to change how to design systems and systems of systems on a larger scale.   RESOURCES Fabulous Fortunes, Fewer Failures, and Faster Fixes from Functional Fundamentals: Scott Havens’ 2019 DevOps Enterprise Summit Talk  Slidedeck for the Havens’ 2019 DOES talk Clojure Pass by reference (C++ only) John Carmack John Carmack Keynote - Quakecon 2013 Panther Systems   TIMESTAMPS [00:24] Intro [02:52] Functional programming [07:59] Gene introduces Scott [09:13] Working at Wal-Mart [11:13] Disaster struck [14:10] One common piece of e-commerce website functionality [17:07] The implications of functional programming for system design [21:05] Changing how to design systems and systems of systems [28:55] Using Panther [33:11] How this affects the hot path and cost [36:43] One bite a time [37:52] Contacting Scott [38:13] Outro

In this newest episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Gail Murphy, Professor of Computer Science and Vice President of Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia. She is also the co-founder, board member, and former Chief Scientist at Tasktop. Dr. Murphy’s research focuses on improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by providing the necessary tools to identify, manage, and coordinate the information that matters most for their work.   During the episode, Kim and Dr. Murphy explore the properties of modularity and information hiding, and how one designs architectures that create them. They also discuss how open source libraries create the incredible software supply chains that developers benefit from everyday, and the surprising new risks they can create.   They discuss the ramifications of system design considerations and decisions made by software developers and why defining software developers’ productivity remains elusive. They further consider open-source software as a triumph of information hiding and how it has created a massively interdependent set of libraries while also enabling incredible co-evolution, which is only made possible by modularity. Listen as Kim and Dr. Murphy discuss how technologists have both succeeded and fallen short on the dream of software being like building blocks, how software development is a subset of knowledge work, and the implications of that insight.   ABOUT THE GUEST   Gail C. Murphy is a Professor of Computer Science and Vice President of Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), as well as co-founder, board member, and former Chief Scientist at Tasktop.   After completing her BS at the University of Alberta in 1987, she worked for five years as a software engineer in the Lower Mainland. She later pursued graduate studies in computer science at the University of Washington, earning first a MS (1994) and then a PhD (1996) before joining University of British Columbia.   Dr. Murphy’s research focuses on improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by providing the necessary tools to identify, manage, and coordinate the information that matters most for their work. She also maintains an active research group with post-doctoral and graduate students. YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT Why defining software developers’ productivity remains elusive and how developers talk about what factors make them feel productive. The value of modularity and how one can achieve it. Ways to decompose software that can have surprising outcomes for even small systems. How open-source software is a triumph of information hiding, creating a massively interdependent set of libraries that also enable incredible co-evolution, which is only made possible by modularity. How we have exceeded and fallen short of the 1980s dream of software being like building blocks, where we can quickly create software by assembling modules, and what we have learned from the infamous leftpad and mime-magic incidents in the last two years. Why and how, in very specific areas, the entire software industry has standardized on a set of modules versus in other areas, where we continue to seemingly go in the opposite direction. A summary of some of the relevant work of Dr. Carliss Baldwin, the William L. White Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Dr. Baldwin studies the process of design and its impact of design architecture on firm strategy, platforms, and business ecosystems. How software development is a subset of knowledge work and the implications of that insight. RESOURCES Dr. Mik Kersten on The Idealcast Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework by Mik Kersten Tasktop The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim Fred Brooks The Mythical Man-Month On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules by Dr. D.L. Parnas Comparison of embedded computer systems on board the Mars rovers Joshua Bloch How to design a good API and why it matters by Joshua Bloch Tricking Sand into Thinking: Deep Learning in Clojure by Dave Liepmann Gene Kim’s reaction on Twitter Gource Gource in Bloom 800+ days of Minecraft in 8 minutes History of Bitcoin History of Python Eclipse Mylyn by Dr. Mik Kersten How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript Laurie Voss’ tweet Rails 5.2.5, 6.0.3.6 and 6.1.3.1 have been released Have there been any lawsuits involving breach of open source licences? GNU General Public License SemanticConflict Fostering Software Developer Productivity through Awareness Increase and Goal-Setting by André Meyer Gail Murphy on Mik + One Podcast On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules Thoughts on Functional Programming Podcast by Eric Normand Alistair Cockburn’s programming challenge on Twitter Gene Kim’s tweet about BLAS: Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms Gene Kim’s tweet about the Gource visualization on the scores of people making commits to the Python ecosystem repo Gene Kim’s Twitter thread about Dr. Carliss Baldwin’s talk: Part 1, Part 2 Academy of Management 2015 TIM Distinguished Scholar Prof Carliss Baldwin Design Rules, Vol. 1: The Power of Modularity by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark Robert C. Merton Black–Scholes model Product Design and Development by Karl Ulrich Design structure matrix Three design structure matrices Real Option TIMESTAMPS [00:27] Intro [03:52] Meet Dr. Murphy [04:32] Determining where design occurs in software development [10:30] Refactoring [16:08] Defining developer productivity and why it defies explanation [20:26] What is modularity, architecture and why they’re important [28:52] An extreme example [30:51] Information hiding [36:06] The leftpad and mime-magic incidents and SemanticConflict [44:13] The work of André Meyer [47:23] Open source is a triumph of information hiding [52:56] Architectures give different trade offs to different problems [57:25] Relationships between a leader’s roles and responsibilities [1:05:10] BLAS: Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms [1:09:20] Communication paths within an organization [1:16:58] The Mylyn project [1:20:11] Analysis of Dr. David Parnas’ 1972 paper [1:26:23] Falcon missile program and socio-technical congruence [1:31:10] The work of Dr. Carliss Baldwin [1:40:01] How Dr. Baldwin defines modularity [1:47:26] Modularity and open source software [1:51:31] Defining real options [1:53:17] 1 billion dollar rearchitecture project [1:55:29] This work is primarily about making decisions [2:01:58] Open source systems are Darwinian systems [2:06:33] Dr. Murphy’s ideal of software developer’s daily work [2:09:53] How to contact Dr. Murphy [2:11:01] Outro

In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Steven Spear on his critiques of several articles from the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, and their characterization of the impact of Just-in-Time (JIT) supply chains and the widespread shortages caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic. While the unprecedented health crisis created a widespread shortage of almost everything—from toilet paper to semiconductor chips to raw materials vital for medical materials—with results that impacted everyday life on a global scale, Dr. Spear makes the claim that JIT lessened the severity of shortages, as opposed to causing them. The discussion is informed by Spear’s work on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations and the Toyota Production System, and from his time observing and working directly with a tier-one Toyota supplier. Kim and Spear dive deep into supply chain dynamics and why they are important to society. The discussion delves into how JIT manufacturing not only revolutionized manufacturing but also the entire manufacturing supply chain and how it increased (not decreased) resilience, productivity, efficiency, and prosperity.  They also explore the structure and dynamics of these JIT supply chains, as well as the similarities of the famous Netflix Chaos Monkey, famous for helping Netflix build resilient services that can survive even widespread cloud outages and the larger, emerging field of Chaos Engineers (arguably, a subset of resilience engineering). Additionally, they explore Toyota’s manufacturing and how its history helped it become one of the least impacted by the semiconductor shortages. They follow that with an examination of the JIT’s antithesis and how it’s similar to the dynamics found in the Soviet’s centrally planned economy, particularly with its IT structure and dynamic results. Kim and Spear tie these things into the three basic tools of finance: net present value, option theory, and portfolio diversification.   ABOUT THE GUESTS Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High-Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System. A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Dr. Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so that they know better and faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple industries including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, US Army rapid equipping, and US Navy readiness.   Visit Steve Spear's Website   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT What are supply chains, why they’re so vast and complex, and why they are important to society How Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing revolutionize manufacturing, the entire manufacturing supply chain, and the supply chain for basically everything How JIT increased, not deceased, the resilience of the supply chain Why Toyota is one of the auto manufacturers least impacted by the semiconductor shortages, partially as a result of what they learned during the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami in 2011 How the structure and dynamics of the Toyota supply chain are almost exactly the same as the structure and dynamics of great systems discussed in previous episodes, such as the COVID mass vaccination clinic with Trent Green and Team of Teams How Toyota has the ability to reconfigure themselves with a low cost of change How these principles are very similar to Netflix chaos monkey and the entire field of what is now called chaos engineering How the antithesis of  JIT is similar to the dynamics found in the Soviet’s centrally planned economy, particularly with its IT structure and results in dynamics How inventory is a substitute for knowledge How this all ties into the three basic tools of finance: net present value, option theory, and portfolio diversification   RESOURCES Announcing New Book from Gene Kim and Dr. Steven J. Spear NPR: Plastic Is The New Toilet Paper For Scientists New York Times: Shopping for Fashion, Six Months On Planet Money: Negative Oil New York Times: How the World Ran Out of Everything New York Times: ‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’: Chaos Strikes Global Shipping Wall Street Journal: Auto Makers Retreat From 50 Years of ‘Just in Time’ Manufacturing The Mainframe DevOps Team Saves the Day at Walmart Frontline: Always Low Prices “The Beer Game” by Prof. John D. Sterman Lean manufacturing Baseline: The End of the Just in Time Supply Chain Method Fast Company: Living in Dell Time CNBC: We traced what it takes to make an iPhone, from its initial design to the components and raw materials needed to make it a reality An Econometric Analysis of Inventory Turnover Performance in Retail Services by Vishal Gaur, Marshall L. Fisher, and Ananth Raman Inventory to Sales Ratio Gross Profit Margin Using FRED site to to calculate ratios of inventory to sales from 1946 to now Walmart vs. Amazon Reuters: Half of U.S. auto suppliers face bankruptcy: study 21st Century Jet - Building the Boeing 777 Episode 3 Boeing 777 — The Ultimate History (II) ASTA SOLUTIONS PTY. LTD. 21st Century Jet - Building the Boeing 777 Episode 2 See Every Single Part Inside an iPhone Code as supply chain How Many Millions of Lines of Code Does It Take? Top 15 Biggest Car Manufacturers in the World (1999 - 2017) Moore's Law graphed vs real CPUs & GPUs 1965 - 2019 The Myth of Productivity vs Compliance: How To Have It All  Reuters: How Toyota thrives when the chips are down BBC News: Tesla partners with nickel mine amid shortage fears Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster Forbes: Toyota's 'Quake-Proof' Supply Chain That Never Was The Netflix Simian Army Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell Los Angeles Business Journal: Just-in-Time Inventory System Proves Vulnerable to Labor Strife Closed California ports impact on the supply chain “We’d Have to Sink the Ships”: Impact Studies and the 2002 West Coast Port Lockout by Peter V. Hall Reuters: How Toyota thrives when the chips are down “The Simpsons” evolution Example of language of simplification and stabilization   TIMESTAMPS [00:37] Intro [09:07] What Dr. Spear found objectionable in the NYT article [13:41] How JIT increased resilience of the supply chain [17:18] What are supply chains and what makes it so complex [24:11] The economic impact of inventory and recapture [28:17] The impact created by mass adoption of JIT practices [42:00] JIT vs lean manufacturing [44:46] How Toyota could handle the semiconductor shortage [51:19] An example of the resilience of Toyota’s supply chain and manufacturing capabilities [57:03] How to motivate everyone to mobilize [1:02:12] What happened with Netflix’s chaos monkey and EYE-shin mattress factory plant [1:08:13] Twitter feedback [1:09:37] The link between experimentation at the EYE-shin plant and low cost of change [1:17:30] Four characters of simplification, standardization, stabilization and synchronization [1:20:46] The 2002 West Coast Port Lockout [1:33:43] What triggered this conversation [1:38:57] The opposite of JIT [1:43:11] Three finance theories [1:50:45] How the Soviet’s centrally planned economy compares with the four characteristics [1:58:23] A misunderstanding of JIT [2:05:15] Outro

In March of 2021, Gene Kim visited the mass vaccination site at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, which has been described by the press as a logistical masterpiece where over 465,000 Oregonians have been vaccinated as of May 2021. After a three-hour tour of the site, Gene Kim sat down with Trent Green, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Legacy Health and one of the organizers of the mass vaccination operation. Kim and Green discuss firsthand what it looks like to vaccinate 8,000 people a day and the strategic level of planning it took to produce and operate the mass vaccination clinic. Green reveals what those first few days of operation were like and how the site was able to increase distribution from 2,000 vaccines per day to 8,000 per day. Lastly, he discusses the lessons he learned during the rollout process and how those lessons can inform how to improve the overall health care system. Also joining the conversation is Dr. Steve Spear, who has helped the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative create its “Perfecting Patient Care System” and has worked on a few pilot programs with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.   ABOUT THE GUESTS Trent Green, COO of Legacy Health, focusing on innovation in Legacy Health’s hospital operations and service lines, and responsible for Legacy Laboratory Services, Legacy Imaging Services and Unity Center. Green oversees the OHSU Knight-Legacy Health Cancer Collaborative, the LifeFlight partnership, as well as other ventures that directly impact hospital operations. Prior to his most recent role, Green served as Legacy Health’s senior vice president, chief strategy officer, and president of Legacy Medical Group. He brings more than 20 years of experience in leading health care organizations, with specific strengths and accomplishments in clinic and hospital operations, strategic planning, business development, marketing, mergers and acquisitions, and finance.    Green’s notable achievements include advancing a re-imagined Master Facility Plan for the Legacy Emanuel and Randall Children’s Hospital campus; navigating a complex regulatory situation at Unity Center by providing decisive leadership and a unified approach to problem-solving, resulting in the successful restoration of status, cultural alignment, best in system performance on medication administration practices, and accelerated incident review and mitigation implementation practices. He also led and developed several of Legacy’s most transformational initiatives, including the PacificSource joint venture, Silverton Health affiliation, Legacy-GoHealth urgent care joint venture, and the OHSU Knight–Legacy Health Cancer Collaborative, among others.   Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High-Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System. A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Dr. Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so that they know better and faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple industries including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, US Army rapid equipping, and US Navy readiness.   Visit Steve Spear's Website   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT Green’s role as the Chief Operating Officer, how it compares to the Chief Medical Officer, and what are the other key leadership roles in a healthcare organization The strategic level of planning, human creativity, and problem-solving it took to produce and operate the mass vaccination clinic as efficient as possible Green’s role and the various leadership roles at the vaccination clinic What the first days of operations at the vaccination site were like The major milestones Green saw as distribution increased from 2,000 vaccines per day to 8,000 vaccines per day Fast versus slow integrated problem-solving styles and theory building versus theory testing The lessons Green has learned during the COVID vaccination rollout process and how these lessons could inform how to improve the overall health care system   RESOURCES Trent Green’s bio at Legacy Health Legacy Health Videos from DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual - Europe NPR: Half Of All U.S. Adults Are Now Fully Vaccinated Against COVID-19 Willamette Week: Oregon’s Largest Vaccination Site is a Logistical Masterpiece. We Take You Inside. Tweet describing the vaccination site with “apocalypse vibe” The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim FEMA Region 10’s video featuring Starbucks and Trent Green The Indicator from Planet Money: Why Hospitals Are Laying People Off The Indicator from Planet Money: Healthcare: The Pandemic's Financial Fallout Operation Warp Speed Eroom's law Fast and Slow Integrated Problem Solving Structures with Gene Kim and Dr. Steve Spear Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley A. McChrystal with Chris Fussell, David Silverman, Tantum Collins Mastering Outages with Incident Command for DevOps: Learning from the Fire Department Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System by Dr. Steven Spear and H. Kent Bowen Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman The DevOps Enterprise Journal: White Papers from the 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summits The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Steven J. Spear The DevOps Enterprise Journal: White Papers from the 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summits The PDSA Cycle (Plan-Do-Study-Act) Leadership Lessons Learned From Improving Flow In Hospital Settings using Theory of Constraints by Dr. Chris Strear Smash the Bottleneck: Fixing Patient Flow for Better Care (and a Better Bottom Line) by Dr. Chris Strear and Danilo Sirias Bleacher Report: A Detailed List of an NFL Coach's Responsibility Walter A Shewhart, 1924, and the Hawthorne factory by M Best and D Neuhauser   TIMESTAMPS [00:20] Intro [04:39] Meet Trent Green [06:19] Key leadership positions in a healthcare organizations [07:52] Meet Steve Spear and his work in the healthcare industry [11:13] The early days of the operations [14:02] The major milestones from increasing distribution [20:42] Steve’s thoughts on an organization’s ability to adapt [24:42] The DevOps Enterprise Summit videos and journal [25:35] Continuation of Steve’s thoughts [26:56] The path of good ideas and barriers [32:04] Trent’s role at the vaccination site [36:15] The strategic level of planning [39:19] Two interviews with Dr. Patrick Cawley and Eroom's law [47:31] Gene’s firsthand observations at the vaccination site [54:40] Fast vs. slow integrated problem-solving styles [1:01:58] Lesson learned in the vaccination process [1:09:50] Uncovering constraints [1:22:25] Cost of change goes down, frequency of change goes up [1:25:46] Becoming an effective coach [1:30:19] Gene adds additional context [1:36:57] Contacting Trent Green [1:38:05] Outro

In the second part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim continues his conversation with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University and creator of the Westrum organization typology model.    In part two of their conversation, Kim and Westrum talk about generative cultures and why Westrum thinks they are more important now than it they were a hundred years ago. Westrum also shares his observations on the increasing number of functional specialities in organizations. He discusses the challenges that arise from having matrixed organizations and the tools to overcome these challenges.    Finally, Westrum previews the new book he’s working on about information flow within organizations.   ABOUT THE GUEST Ron Westrum is Emeritus Professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University. He holds a B.A. (honors) from Harvard University and a Ph.D in Sociology from the University of Chicago.   Dr. Westrum is a specialist in the sociology of science and technology, and on complex organizations. He has written three books, Complex Organizations: Growth, Development and Change; Technologies and Society: The Shaping of People and Things, and Sidewinder: Creative Missile Design at China Lake. He has also written about fifty articles and book chapters. His work on organizational culture has been valuable for the aviation industry and to medical safety, as well as to other areas of endeavor. He has been a consultant to NASA, the National Research Council, and the Resilience Core Group. He is currently at work on a book on information flow cultures.   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT Why Westrum thinks creating generative cultures is more important now than it was 100 years ago His observations on the increasing number of functional specialities and how long it’s been going on The challenges that arise from having matrix organizations and the tools to overcome these challenges The book he’s working on about information flow within organizations, what areas he’s pursuing and what has surprised him as he delves into specific examples   RESOURCES The Sociology and Typologies of Organizations, and Technical Maestros with Dr. Ron Westrum Sidewinder: Creative Missile Design at China Lake by Ron Westrum Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster The Citigroup Center (formerly Citicorp Center) Latent human error Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II by Arthur Herman Admiral Thomas Moore Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession by Dr. Leonard Wong and Dr. Stephen J. Gerras The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley A. McChrystal with Chris Fussell, David Silverman, Tantum Collins Hubble Space Telescope NOVA - Aircraft Carrier 21st Century Jet - Building the Boeing 777 Boeing to Buy McDonnell Douglas Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards (ETOPS) Alan Mulally Technology in Retrospect and Critical Events in Science (TRACES) General George C. Marshall The Marshall Plan on NPR’s Planet Money 2015 State Of DevOps Report Westrum organizational culture The study of information flow: A personal journey by Ron Westrum Stand and Deliver Mayo Clinic How a Friendly Fire Tragedy in Sicily Transformed Airborne Warfare The New Heat On Ford Email Ron Westrum   TIMESTAMPS   [00:00] Intro [02:39] Why generative cultures are more important now [14:50] Exposing latent pathogens [19:39] Gene’s thoughts and a few corrections [28:59] The increase in silos [34:53] How Westrum would organize the organization [40:42] Why matrix organizations are fundamentally unstable and how to cope [44:57] LaunchDarkly and DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual [46:47] Matrix organizations and how to help increase likelihood of success [57:26] Building the Boeing 777 [1:06:24] Where generative characteristics came from [1:11:10] Bridging the world of R&D to the world of operations [1:14:58] Team of Teams example [1:20:09] General George C. Marshall [1:24:35] Other mechanisms Westrum has seen in high performing teams [1:32:30] Westrum’s new book [1:38:53] What DevOps has helped Westrum [1:39:47] Contacting Admiral Richardson [1:41:36] Outro

In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University. His work on organizational culture and his contribution of the Westrum organizational typology model have been instrumental in understanding what makes a high-performing organization across industries. For decades, he has studied complex organizations from medicine to aviation to the nuclear industry.   In part one of their conversation, Kim and Westrum talk about the stark contrast between NASA’s highly experimental culture of the Apollo space program versus the highly compliance-driven culture of the US Space Shuttle program, and Westrum’s opinions on how to bring that experimental culture back. They also discuss the origins of the Westrum organizational typology model and some of the insights that led to it. Finally, Westrum shares what organizations should do when things go wrong in complex systems.   ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Ron Westrum is Emeritus Professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University. He holds a B.A. (honors) from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago.   Dr. Westrum is a specialist in the sociology of science and technology and complex organizations. He has written three books, Complex Organizations: Growth, Development and Change; Technologies and Society: The Shaping of People and Things, and Sidewinder: Creative Missile Design at China Lake. He has also written about fifty articles and book chapters. His work on organizational culture has been valuable for the aviation industry and to medical safety, as well as to other areas of endeavor. He has been a consultant to NASA, the National Research Council, and the Resilience Core Group. He is currently at work on a book on information flow cultures.   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT   Why much of the body of knowledge around safety culture came from sociology as opposed to psychology. How Westrum views the stark contrast in NASA between the highly experimental culture of the Apollo space program versus what has been characterized as a highly compliance-driven culture of the US Space Shuttle program. Insightful and useful opinions on what would be required to bring that experimental culture back in NASA. The origins of the Westrum organization typology model and some of the insights that led to it. Why Westrum views the notion of a technical maestro important to get the desired outcomes. What Westrum thinks should ideally happen when things go wrong in complex systems.   RESOURCES   State of DevOps Reports Westrum organizational culture The study of information flow: A personal journey by Ron Westrum Sidewinder: Creative Missile Design at China Lake by Ron Westrum Complex Organizations: Growth, Development and Change by Ron Westrum Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow Crew resource management or cockpit resource management (CRM) The Human Factor in Aircraft Accidents by David Beaty Naked Pilot: The Human Factor in Aircraft Accidents by David Beaty United Airlines Flight 232 Cockpit Voice Recorder Database Captain Al Haynes' 1991 lecture at NASA Ames Research Center It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy by Michael Abrashoff Apollo 13 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster Space Shuttle Columbia disaster CBS News article: "Readdy says 'no rationale' for spy satellite inspection" Apollo 13 (1995) - Square Peg in a Round Hole Scene Health inequalities among British civil servants: the Whitehall II study by Jane Ferrie, Martin J Shipley, George Davey Smith, Stephen A Stansfeld and Michael G Marmot Facing Ambiguous Threats by Michael Roberto, Richard M.J. Bohmer, and Amy C. Edmondson DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual Nasa Cut or Delayed Safety Spending by Stuart Diamond Mars Curiosity Rover Landing Space 2015 How Apple Is Organized for Innovation by Joel M. Podolny and Morten T. Hansen Arthur Squires The Tender Ship: Governmental Management of Technological Change by Arthur Squires Jacob Rabinow Federal Research and Development Expenditures and the National Economy: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Domestic and International Scientific Planning and Analysis of the Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninety-fourth Congress, Second Session Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet Excellence in the Surface Navy by Gregg G. Gullickson Excellence in the Surface Navy by Gregg G. Gullickson, Richard D. Chenette and Reuben T. Harris How NASA Builds Teams: Mission Critical Soft Skills for Scientists, Engineers, and Project Teams by Charles J. Pellerin The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks George C. Marshall: Four (4) Volumes - Education of a General, 1880-1939; Ordeal and Hope, 1939-1943; Organizer of Victory, 1943-1945; Statesman, 1945-1959 by Forrest C. Pogue Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley A. McChrystal with Chris Fussell, David Silverman, Tantum Collins Forge of Democracy by Neil MacNeil Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II by Arthur Herman Email Ron Westrum   TIMESTAMPS   [00:00] Intro [04:01] Meet Ron Westrum [07:19] Why prominent figures in the safety field come from sociology [08:38] Observations about the work on airline safety [11:17] How Ron’s work is relevant and why culture is important [16:56] Apollo 13 and Space Shuttle Columbia disaster [23:15] Westrum organization typology model [24:38] United Airlines Flight 232 [34:45] Understanding the dynamics of generative organizations [41:57] Three western typologies beyond the table [50:16] The Whitehall II study [53:05] What the word generative means to Ron [55:31] The two NASAs and how he would drive out fear [58:44] LaunchDarkly and DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual [1:00:37] What Ron imagines would cause a different outcome as NASA [1:08:40] It matters who’s at the top [1:12:18] The technological maestro concept [1:16:38] How the technological maestro concept applies [1:26:20] How these characteristics can be learned [1:28:51] Building a community of good judgment [1:33:39] The role of CNO [1:35:27] How organizations learn and adapt generative capabilities [1:42:01] What should ideally happen when something goes wrong [1:45:41] Information flow, organization’s nervous system, and management [1:48:01] Contacting Admiral Richardson [1:49:06] Outro  

In the second part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast Gene Kim and Admiral John Richardson, former Chief of Naval Operations, continue their discussion on the importance of leadership in large, complex organizations, especially enabling leadership training early in one’s career, and exploring why he views it as so important. Admiral Richardson also shares why radical delegation is needed more than ever, and provides tools and techniques for enabling it. Kim and Admiral Richardson discuss the important characteristics needed to integrate problems solving into an organization. And finally, they talk about the nature of the US Naval Reactors that are responsible for the safe and reliable operations of the US Naval Propulsion Program, why that warrants the command of a 4-star admiral, and what should ideally happen when accidents occur in complex systems. Also joining the conversation is Dr. Steve Spear, who has written extensively about the US Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program program in his book The High-Velocity Edge. ABOUT THE GUESTS Admiral John Richardson served as the Chief of Naval Operations for four years, which is the professional head of the US Navy. While in the Navy, Richardson served in the submarine force and commanded the attack submarine USS Honolulu in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for which he was awarded the Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale Inspirational Leadership Award. He also served as the Director of Naval Reactors, responsible for the design, safety, certification, operating standards, material control, maintenance, disposal, and regulatory oversight of over 100 nuclear power plants operating on nuclear-powered warships deployed around the world. Since his retirement in August 2019, he has joined the boards of several major corporations and other organizations, including Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, and Exelon, a Fortune 100 company that operates the largest fleet of nuclear plants in America and delivers power to over 10 million customers.  Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High-Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System. A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Dr. Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so that they know better and faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple industries including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, US Army rapid equipping, and US Navy readiness.   Visit Steve Spear's Website   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT Admiral Richardson’s views on the importance of training leadership in the earliest stages of a sailor’s career Why leadership is so important Various tools and techniques for enabling radical delegation Important characteristics of the different ways that integrated problem solving incurs in organizations The nature of the function organization that is the U.S. Naval reactors, comprehensively responsible for safe and reliably operations of the US Naval Propulsion Program and why it warrants being commanded by a four-star admiral What should leaders in complex organizations do when accidents occur   RESOURCES Leadership Development and Balancing Creativity and Control with Admiral John Richardson (Part I) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte Navy Leader Development Framework A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority v. 1 A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority v. 2 Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter by Adam Lashinsky How are the six-page narratives structured in Jeff Bezos' S-Team meetings? Flipped meetings: Learning from Amazon’s meeting policy by Stowe Boyd The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Steven J. Spear Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley A. McChrystal, Chris Fussell, David Silverman and Tantum Collins The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim Michael Nygard’s episodes on The Idealcast Part 1, summit presentations, and Part 2 Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Thinking, Fast and Slow’s Wikipedia page The Idealcast episodes featuring David Silverman and Jessica Reif Part 1 and Part 2   TIMESTAMPS [00:00] Intro [01:24] Toughing up the training [09:37] Feedback from the fleet [11:00] Discussions with the instructors [14:03] A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority [18:07] Designing for the next place [28:18] Reducing the cost of change [35:22] Configurations for failure or success [39:55] Tools for integration [47:39] How structure affects the dynamics of how organizations work [51:59] Gene reflects on integrated problem solving [57:28] Two domains of activities to use the slow communication paths [1:00:42] If these mental models resonate with Admiral Richardson [1:02:31] What point does the center get involved [1:07:47] Why the delegation for the nuclear reactor core is important [1:14:00] What happens when complex systems go wrong [1:20:37] Contacting Admiral Richardson

In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years, the top officer in the Navy. Before that, Admiral Richardson served as director of the US Naval Reactors, which is comprehensively responsible for the safe and reliable operation of the US Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion program.   In part one of this two-part conversation, Kim and Admiral Richardson explore how the Department of Defense and the armed services can lead the way to respond effectively to the digital disruption agenda. Admiral Richardson discusses how he operationalized creating a high velocity learning dynamic across the entire US Navy. He also presents his theories on how we need to balance compliance and creativity. And finally, he presents some amazing examples of how to strip away the barnacles from processes, those layers of controls and supervision that may have crept in over the decades.   Also joining the conversation is Dr. Steve Spear, who has written extensively about the US Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program program in his book The High-Velocity Edge.   ABOUT THE GUESTS   Admiral John Richardson served as the Chief of Naval Operations for four years, which is the professional head of the US Navy. While in the Navy, Richardson served in the submarine force and commanded the attack submarine USS Honolulu in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for which he was awarded the Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale Inspirational Leadership Award. He also served as the Director of Naval Reactors, responsible for the design, safety, certification, operating standards, material control, maintenance, disposal, and regulatory oversight of over 100 nuclear power plants operating on nuclear-powered warships deployed around the world.   Since his retirement in August 2019, he has joined the boards of several major corporations and other organizations, including Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, and Exelon, a Fortune 100 company that operates the largest fleet of nuclear plants in America and delivers power to over 10 million customers.    Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High-Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System. A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Dr. Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so that they know better and faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple industries including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, US Army rapid equipping, and US Navy readiness.   Visit Steve Spear's Website   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT Why high-velocity learning was so important to Admiral Richardson when he was the Chief of Naval Operations. How Admiral Richardson operationalized creating a high velocity learning dynamic across the entire US Navy. His views on the need to balance compliance and creativity. Specific advice on what leaders must do when the balance tilts too much toward compliance and has taken away people’s ability to unleash their full creative potential. Examples of how to strip away the barnacles from processes. Why radical delegations are so important. How Admiral Richardson came to believe that creating leadership communities and connections are essential. Where software competencies must show up in modern organizations.   RESOURCES Dr. Steve Spear’s episodes on The Idealcast Part 1, summit presentations, and Part 2. The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Steven J. Spear. The Boeing Company Exelon BWX Technologies, Inc. Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 7 Tao Te Ching - Chapter 17 Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority v. 1 A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority v. 2 The Air Force's Digital Journey in 12 Parsecs or Less at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2020 Failure Is Not an Option by Gene Kranz Admiral Hyman G. Rickover and Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande Fingerspitzengefühl The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim 2021 DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual - Europe The Shift: Creating a Culture of High Performance by Dr. Andre Martin The Key to High Performance: What the Data Says by Dr. Nicole Forsgren Dr. Andre Martin’s DevOps Enterprise Summit presentation: “The Shift: Creating a Culture of High Performance” by Dr. Andre Martin, VP People Development, Google Adrian Cockcroft on the Future of the Cloud Patton George S. Patton slapping incidents The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley A. McChrystal, Chris Fussell, David Silverman and Tantum Collins Navy Leader Development Framework Tombstone   TIMESTAMPS   [00:00] Intro [01:54] Meet Admiral John Richardson [04:00] Responding effectively to the digital disruption agenda [07:05] Admiral Richardson in his own words and his Act 2 [08:27] Meet Steve Spear [09:29] How Steve’s work caught Admiral Richardson’s attention [11:46] Admiral Richardson’s efforts to create a learning dynamic [19:18] A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority [27:01] What he does with leader who’s afraid of the concept [28:48] Contrasts between learning culture and compliance culture [37:37] Fingerspitzengefühl [41:03] Steve’s thoughts on compliance vs creativity [43:47] Leadership development and compliance control [48:38] Addressing near misses [56:29] DevOps Enterprise Summit 2021 in Europe [57:52] Scar tissue processes [1:01:22] Finding a balance with leaders [1:09:43] The story behind general Eisenhower and General Patton [1:14:02] The three layers of creativity [1:27:23] How technology changed a sense of community [1:33:30] Admiral Richardson’s working relationships in the Navy [1:42:19] Where the software capabilities need to show up [1:48:02] Navy Leader Development Framework Version 3.0 [1:51:22] Outro

In the final episode of the first season of The Idealcast, Gene Kim sits down with Jeffrey Fredrick, coauthor of Agile Conversations, to synthesize and reflect upon some of the major themes from the entire season.  In Gene’s continued quest to understand why organizations behave the way they do, Fredrick helps connect the dots and points to new areas that deserve more study. They discuss the nature of knowledge work, including how software creation requires so much more conversation and joint cognitive work, and the challenges this presents. They also dive into the bodies of knowledge that are required as we push more decision making and value creation to the edges of the organization.  Then, Gene and Fredrick revisit the concept of integration and why it’s so much more important now than 50 years ago. And finally, they discuss why “Are you happy?” and “Are you proud of your work?” are two very powerful questions and what they actually reveal about people and the work they’re performing. And why this is all so important as we try to create organizations that maximize learning for everyone. BIO: Jeffrey Fredrick is an internationally recognized expert in software development with over 25 years’ experience covering both sides of the business/technology divide. His experience includes roles as Vice President of Product Management, Vice President of Engineering, and Chief Evangelist. He has also worked as an independent consultant on topics including corporate strategy, product management, marketing, and interaction design. Jeffrey is based in London and is currently Managing Director of TIM, an Acuris Company. He also runs the London Organisational Learning Meetup and is a CTO mentor through CTO Craft.   Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jtf  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jfredrick/ Website: https://www.conversationaltransformation.com/   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT The nature of knowledge work and how it requires more conversation and joint cognitive work and the challenges it presents The body of knowledge required in decision making and value creation for the organization Concepts of integration and why it’s important now What the questions, “Are you happy?” and “Are you proud of your work?,” reveal about people and their work How Dr. Thomas Kuhns’s work pertains to management models RESOURCES Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick Continuous Integration and Testing Conference (CITCON) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Dr. Thomas Kuhn A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (ACOUP) The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni Dr. Steve Spear’s episode on The Idealcast Dr. Steve Spear’s 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summit Talk Michael Nygard’s episode on The Idealcast MIT’s Beer Game Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman The DevOps Enterprise Journal Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore Command in War by Martin van Creveld Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day by Timothy Fitz Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility by Jonathan Smart   TIMESTAMPS   [00:11] Intro [03:13] Meet Jeffrey Fredrick [03:54] Why conversations are important [08:03] Why conversations are more important now than 100 years ago [11:02] The Five Dysfunctions of a Team [13:08] Integration [16:33] The need for better integration now [20:18] What is information hiding and why it’s important [26:32] The pace of change moves the trade-off [31:41] Two important questions to ask [42:17] The system of fast and slow [48:25] Selection bias [51:07] Thank you from Gene [52:13] Jeffrey’s significant a-ha moment [59:45] Injecting change [1:06:24] Structure and dynamics [1:12:44] Command in War [1:23:39] Complaining about a feature factory [1:25:40] Standardized work and integrating feedback [1:22:21] Two elements of information flow [1:36:49] Insights on peer programming [1:43:54] Learning more and learning earlier [1:45:55] Is there something missing? [1:48:50] Contacting Jeffrey Fredrick [1:49:55] Outro

This episode of The Idealcast features the second part of Gene Kim’s interview with Team of Teams coauthor and CrossLead CEO David Silverman and CrossLead Head of R&D Jessica Reif.  In this episode, they take up the topic of how internal marketplaces are structures that can connect mid-level leaders to each other, helping allocate scarce resources to where they're needed most, which enables the further unlocking of capacities. They discuss challenges around the cost of change and the new skills that mid-level leaders need in order to survive and thrive in an era where being functionally excellent in one’s own silo is not enough. They further talk about the similarities between special operations and agile, especially comparing and contrasting terms that further concretize concepts the agile and DevOps community have held for years but struggled to name. And finally, they discuss where we go from here. 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 Product Delivery Manager for applied machine learning and engineering teams at Oracle Data Cloud, where her role was to facilitate agile development among a team-of-teams. Jessica holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. In her free time, she enjoys golfing, baking, and hiking.  Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jess_Reif Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-reif/ Website: https://www.crosslead.com/ YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT How internal marketplaces are structures that can connect mid-level leaders to each other and allocate scarce resources to where they are needed most Concept and terms found within the agile and special operations communities What happens when the cost of change is intolerably high New skills that midlevel need to survive and thrive to help organizations win   RESOURCES Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt Beyond the Goal: Eliyahu Goldratt Speaks on the Theory of Constraints (Your Coach In A Box) by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt Beyond The Phoenix Project: The Origins and Evolution Of DevOps by Gene Kim and John Willis Peter Skillman’s Ted Talk: Marshmallow Design Challenge Tom Wujec’s Ted Talk: Build a Tower, Build a Team The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy by Mark Schwartz Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart IT Revolution’s virtual library The Great Man Theory Transformational Leadership and DevOps - Dr. Steve Mayner Learning to be a Transformational Leader - Dr. Steve Mayner The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn Paradigm shift Isaac Newton by James Gleick   TIMESTAMPS   [00:08] Intro [01:55] What parallels Jessica Rief sees in the technology domain [08:56] What Steve Spear’s story means to David Silverman [14:47] Empowerment is not inherently a good thing [20:35] The Core, Chronic Conflict and the Marshmallow Challenge [28:28] Leaders, get comfortable with the unknown and trust somebody [37:39] Micromanagement in the technology space [41:11] IT Revolution’s new books and virtual library [42:39] Advice to micromanagers [46:34] Auditing your time appropriate to your level of leadership [48:28] Solving problems closer to the edge [53:20] The role of mid-level management [58:47] What skillsets are important to winning [1:07:22] Leadership theories [1:08:47] How Team of Teams has affected daily work [1:18:32] How to contact Jessica and David [1:19:40] Thomas Kuhn’s Paradigm shift [1:23:22] Newton’s three laws of motions [1:25:35] Outro

In the latest Dispatch from the Scenius, Gene Kim shares David Silverman’s 2020 presentation from DevOps Enterprise Summit London - Virtual. In a continuation of Episode 11, the Team of Teams coauthor and CEO of CrossLead talks about the key concepts from Team of Teams, and provides even more context for so many of the topics covered in last week’s episode.    David talks about the genesis of the joint special operations command, which was created after the failure of the daring Iran hostage rescue in 1979, and how it found itself in 2003 in Afghanistan and Iraq, tactically winning but strategically losing, unable to find terrorist leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq. He describes the principles that they drew upon, which will be familiar to almost everyone in the DevOps community, the practices that it led to, the amazing outcomes that resulted, as well as the leadership skills needed in this new world.  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/   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT: Key concepts from the book, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World The genesis of the joint special operations command How the principles, practices, outcomes and leaderships relate to the DevOps community   RESOURCES   Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell Cynefin framework   TIMESTAMPS   [00:08] Intro [01:56] Meet David Silverman [04:05] The inception of US special operations [07:35] Best practices associated with management [10:59] Cynefin framework [11:53] Complexity environment [14:32] How to senior business leadership can communicate effectively and persuasively [15:59] Back to fundamentals [19:55] DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual [21:33] Think as a living organism [23:19] Model of radical transparency [24:02] How to make it work inside your organizations [31:24] How to define great leadership [33:53] David’s request for examples [34:22] Coming up in the next episode [35:42] Outro  

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 Product Delivery Manager for applied machine learning and engineering teams at Oracle Data Cloud, where her role was to facilitate agile development among a team-of-teams. Jessica holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. In her free time, she enjoys golfing, baking, and hiking.  Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jess_Reif Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-reif/ Website: https://www.crosslead.com/   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT: The philosophy and thinking behind the book, Team of Teams The organization and management required to support the large group of personnel involved in the mission described in the book The dramatic changes in the transformations mentioned in the book and how and why it worked The structure and dynamics before and after the transformation What leadership characteristics are needed in this new way of working Ops Intelligence Update Call What was required to increase the temp of operations   RESOURCES What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team by Charles Duhigg Boundaries Updated and Expanded Edition: When to Say Yes, How to Say No To Take Control of Your Life by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend Wharton’s Carton: CEOs Have Real Vision Problems by Howard R. Gold Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell DevOps culture: Westrum organizational culture Psychological safety Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz How Can Leaders Overcome the Blurry Vision Bias? Identifying an Antidote to the Paradox of Vision Communication by Andrew M. Carton and Brian J. Lucas Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois and John Willis   TIMESTAMPS   [00:08] Intro [03:26] Meet David Silverman [05:50] Meet Jessica Rief [06:59] Writing down his experiences to teach [12:58] Who are David’s students and what he was teaching [14:05] Applying these techniques to COVID-19 [17:54] Comparing David’s experience to General Stanley McChrystal’s experience [23:30] Remembering Defense Information Systems Agency CTO Dawn Meyerriecks’ org chart [25:30] Getting out of own way [28:31] Top differences in what David was trying to achieve [33:46] Compare and contrast the leadership characteristics [37:24] Jess reflecting on changes required at various levels of leaderships [39:58] A look at structural changes or lack thereof [47:50] The chessmaster vs the gardner [49:18] Changing the middle management [56:28] DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual [58:04] The frozen middle [1:00:06] Advice to define the work [1:06:10] Ops Intelligence Update Call [1:15:29] Create concrete manifestation of the vision [1:23:30] The dynamics of having the Ops Intelligence Update Call [1:26:03] The need for middle management to augment the process [1:30:55] Gene’s favorite part of Team of Teams [1:34:43] Creating these relationships in a large scale [1:39:55] Successful execution drives strategy [1:41:51] How to reach David and Jessica [1:43:06] Outro

On this continuation of Gene Kim’s interview with Michael Nygard, Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, they discuss his reflections on Admiral Rickover's work with the US Naval Reactor Core and how it may or may not resonate with the principles we hold so near and dear in the DevOps community. They also tease apart the learnings from the architecture of the Toyota Production System and their ability to drive down the cost of change.  They also discuss how we can tell when there are genuinely too many “musical notes” or when those extra notes allow for better and simpler systems that are easier to build and maintain and can even make other systems around them simpler too? And how so many of the lessons and sensibilities came from working with Rich Hickey, the creator of the Clojure programming language.  Bio: Michael Nygard strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers around the world. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Living with systems in production taught Michael about the importance of operations and writing production-ready software. Highly-available, highly-scalable commerce systems are his forte. Michael has written and co-authored several books, including 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and the bestseller Release It!, a book about building software that survives the real world. He is a highly sought speaker who addresses developers, architects, and technology leaders around the world. Michael is currently Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, the company reimagining the business of travel.   Twitter: @mtnygard LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtnygard/ Website: https://www.michaelnygard.com/   You’ll Learn About: Admiral Rickover’s work with the Naval Nuclear Reactor Core Building great architecture for generality. Architecture as an organizing logic and means of software construction. Toyota Production System’s ability to drive down the cost of change through architecture Clojure programming language Cynefin framework How to know if a code is simpler or more complex   RESOURCES Cynefin framework Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz "Why software development is an engineering discipline," presentation by Glenn Vanderburg at O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference "10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation," presentation by John Allspaw "Architecture Without an End State," presentation by Michael T. Nygard at YOW! 2012 "Spec-ulation Keynote," presentation by Rich Hickey re-frame (re-frame is the magnificent UI framework which both Mike and I love using and hold in the highest regard — by no means should the "too many notes" comment be construed that re-frame has too many notes!) "Fabulous Fortunes, Fewer Failures, and Faster Fixes from Functional Fundamentals," presentation by Scott Havens at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas, 2019 "Clojure for Java Programmers Part 1," presentation by Rich Hickey at NYC Java Study Group Simple Made Easy presentation by Rich Hickey at Strange Loop 2011 Love Letter To Clojure (Part 1) by Gene Kim The Idealcast, Episode 5: The Pursuit of Perfection: Dominant Architectures, Structure, and Dynamics: A Conversation With Dr. Steve Spear LambdaCast podcast hosted by David Koontz TIMESTAMPS   [00:09] Intro [02:19] Mike’s reflections on Steve Spear, Admiral Rickover and the US Naval reactor core [04:33] Admiral Rickover’s 1962 memo [08:13] Cynefin framework [12:40] Applying to software engineering [16:06] Gene tells Mike a Steve Spear’s story [18:58] 10+ deploys a day everyday at Flickr [19:43] Back to the story [24:34] Why the story is important [27:35] When notes are useful [35:05] Too many notes vs. too few notes [40:00] DevOps Enterprise Summit Vegas Virtual [41:35] How to know if a code is simpler or more complex [47:23] A lively exchange of ideas [51:31] The opposing argument [54:20] Implementing items of interests [55:21] Back to the payment processing example [56:07] Case 3 [1:03:03] The challenge with Option 2 [1:08:19] Pure function [1:10:19] Rich Hickey and Clojure [1:15:01] Rich Hickey’s “Simple Made Easy” presentation [1:16:37] Exploring those ideas work at the macro scale [1:22:31] Immutability concept [1:23:58] The importance of senior leaders’ understanding of these issues [1:26:53] Outro

In the latest Dispatch from the Scenius, Gene Kim provides original commentary on Michael Nygard’s 2016 DevOps Enterprise Summit presentation Tempo, Maneuverability, and Initiative DevOps has been and continues to be part of a larger shift in organizational structure, system architecture, infrastructure, and process design. In order to be successful, each of these must change together to achieve a high tempo. In this presentation, Nygard talks about maneuverability and how to get teams, and teams of teams, working toward a common objective. And he provides principles and patterns for how large organizations can overcome the pitfalls they so often face. In this presentation, Nygard provides several real-life examples of failed and successful transformation efforts through a lens of tempo, maneuver warfare, and initiative.   Bio: Michael Nygard strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers around the world. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Living with systems in production taught Michael about the importance of operations and writing production-ready software. Highly-available, highly-scalable commerce systems are his forte. Michael has written and co-authored several books, including 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and the bestseller Release It!, a book about building software that survives the real world. He is a highly sought speaker who addresses developers, architects, and technology leaders around the world. Michael is currently Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, the company reimagining the business of travel. Twitter: @mtnygard LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtnygard/ Website: https://www.michaelnygard.com/ You’ll Learn About: John Boyd’s energy maneuverability theory and maneuver warfare Architect elevator Edge of Instability Disposable infrastructure Horizontal and vertical integrity RESOURCES Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael T. Nygard Architect Elevator by Gregor Hohpe Gregor Hohpe’s presentation at SummerSOC 2019 DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual TIMESTAMPS [00:07] Intro [01:20] Mike Nygard’s speech [02:29] A story of despair and hope [03:55] Gene explains the joke [04:15] Back to Mike’s story [09:17] Military concept: manoeuvrability [14:12] Architect Elevator [16:50] Edge of Instability [17:55] DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 [19:32] War of attrition [20:47] Disposable infrastructure [22:59] Studying tempo [24:57] Horizontal and vertical integrity [28:52] What is the intent [32:44] Gene’s last observations [36:46] Outro

In the latest episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim is joined by Michael Nygard, a senior vice president at Sabre and author of the bestselling Release It! Nygard has helped businesses and technology leaders in their transformation journeys over his long career and was even one of the inspirations behind The Unicorn Project’s protagonist, Maxine.   In their discussion, Kim and Nygard explore how we can enable thousands or even tens of thousands of engineers to work together toward common objectives, including the structure and dynamics required to achieve it. They also examine what truly great architecture looks like and the continuing importance and relevance of Conway’s Law.   Bio: Michael Nygard strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers around the world. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Living with systems in production taught Michael about the importance of operations and writing production-ready software. Highly-available, highly-scalable commerce systems are his forte. Michael has written and co-authored several books, including 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and the bestseller Release It!, a book about building software that survives the real world. He is a highly sought speaker who addresses developers, architects, and technology leaders around the world. Michael is currently Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, the company reimagining the business of travel.   Twitter: @mtnygard LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtnygard/ Website: https://www.michaelnygard.com/ You’ll Learn About: How to build great architecture for large teams. The real implications of Conway’s Law. Architecture as an organizing logic and means of software construction. Real-life stories of technology leaders’ transformation journeys. Decentralized economic decision making. The fear cycle and predictability. The after effects of the Yegge memo. A great definition of what great architecture is.  Leadership and the relationship between the business’ architecture and the technology architecture of the business. RESOURCES Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael T. Nygard Clojure programming language Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) operating system Totality Corporation The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen MCDP1: Warfighting Conway's law Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell The Fear Cycle by Michael T. Nygard State of DevOps Report DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 Coherence Penalty for Humans by Michael T. Nygard Michael Nygard on Cognicast podcast   TIMESTAMPS   [00:07] Intro [02:12] Meet Mike Nygard [04:36] What is TPF operating system? [05:40] Finding the perspective to write Release It! [11:07] Totality Corporation [13:54] Moving large teams towards common objective [18:37] Decentralized economic decision making [19:52] The Principles of Product Development Flow [23:38] Tale of two outages [27:27] Distance incentive supply [32:00] Architecture is one top predictors of performance [35:05] Other attributes of good architecture [39:19] The Fear Cycle [43:40] An amazing finding in State of DevOps Report [45:02] Amazon replatforming example [50:35] The universal takeaways [53:07] DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 [54:55] Characteristics of reorganizations and structural changes [1:00:00] Self-contained systems [1:02:40] Mike’s definition of architecture [1:07:13] Coherence Penalty for Humans [1:10:10] Leadership’s responsibility to the architecture

In this bonus follow-up interview, Gene Kim and Dr. Steve Spear dig into what makes for great leadership today, including the importance of distributed decision-making and problem-solving. They showcase the real advantages of allowing more decisions to be made by the people closest to the work, who are the most suited to solve them.   Dr. Spear also shares his personal accounts of the honorable Paul O’Neill, the late CEO of Alcoa who built an incredible culture of safety and performance during his tenure. And Kim and Spear dive deeper into the structure and dynamics of the famous MIT beer game.   ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System.  A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so they know better faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple “verticals” including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, Army rapid equipping, and Navy readiness.   High velocity learning concepts became the basis of the Alcoa Business System—which led to 100s of millions in recurring savings, the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiatives “Perfecting Patient Care System”—credited with sharp reductions in complications like MRSA and CLABs, Pratt & Whitney’s “Engineering Standard Work”—which when piloted led to winning the engine contract for the Joint Strike Fighter, the operating system for Detroit Edison, and the Navy’s high velocity learning line of effort—an initiative led by the Chief of Naval Operations. A pilot with a pharma company cut the time for the ‘hit to lead’ phase in early stage drug discovery from twelve months to six. Spear has published in Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, Health Services Research, Harvard Business Review, Academic Administrator, and the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings He invented the patented See to Solve Real Time Alert System and is principal investigator for new research on making critical decisions when faced with hostile data.  He’s supervised more than 40 theses and dissertations. He holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton and worked at the University of Tokyo, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment and Prudential Bache. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stevespear Email: steve@hvellc.com Website: thehighvelocityedge.com   You’ll Learn About: Distributed decision-making Developing group leader core Safety culture at ALCOA The need for specialization in an increasingly complex world MIT beer game Feedback builds trust Episode Timeline: [00:10] Intro [01:36] Limitations of the leader [08:03] Taking the Moses example to the assembly line at Toyota [11:12] Developing group leader core [13:32] Back to the Moses problem [14:19] Gene’s two thoughts [16:01] Planet Money’s SUMMER SCHOOL 2: Markets & Pickles [18:38] An Excerpt from The DevOps Handbook [20:57] Paul O’Neill’s job to set standards [22:35] Elements of rugged topography [23:37] Sponsored ad: DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual [24:39] Setting context [25:30] The structure and resulting dynamics [28:00] Call it out early and often [30:45] Making everyone feel responsible [36:51] Safety culture at ALCOA [37:33] “If there’s a failure, it’s my failure” [38:52] Topography of the problem [42:27] Applying to the car example [46:50] Benefits of specialization in modern medicine [50:37] Complexity will keep increasing as time goes by or is it reduced? [52:31] The need for specialization will continue to grow [53:22] MIT Beer Game through the lens of structure and dynamics [1:00:14] Feedback builds trust [1:01:21] Dirty Harry’s final scene [1:03:08] Outro Resources: SUMMER SCHOOL 2: Markets & Pickles on Planet Money Paul O'Neill interview worker safety at ALCOA Paul O'Neill on Safety Leadership Paul O'Neill Speech on "The Irreducible Components of Leadership" DevOps Enterprise Summit DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis and Jez Humble The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Dr. Steve Spear “The Beer Game” by Prof. John D. Sterman The Idealcast EP. 5: The Pursuit of Perfection: Dominant Architectures, Structure, and Dynamics: a Conversation With Dr. Steve Spear The Idealcast EP. 6: (Dispatch from the Scenius) Dr. Steven Spear’s 2019 and 2020 DOES Talks on Rapid, Distributed, Dynamic Learning

In the latest Dispatch from the Scenius, Gene Kim brings you two of Dr. Steve Spear’s DevOps Enterprise Summit presentations in their entirety.   In Spear’s 2019 presentation, “Discovering Your Way to Greatness: How Finding and Fixing Faults is the Path to Perfection,” he talks about the need and the value of finding faults in our thinking that result in faults in our doing.    Spear continues to explore this lesson in his 2020 presentation about the US Navy 100 years ago, when they were at a crucial inflection point in both technology and strategic mission. It is one of the most remarkable examples of creating distributed learning in a vast enterprise.    As always, Gene provides exclusive commentary to the presentations. ABOUT THE GUESTS   Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System.  A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so they know better faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple “verticals” including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, Army rapid equipping, and Navy readiness.    High velocity learning concepts became the basis of the Alcoa Business System—which led to 100s of millions in recurring savings, the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiatives “Perfecting Patient Care System”—credited with sharp reductions in complications like MRSA and CLABs, Pratt & Whitney’s “Engineering Standard Work”—which when piloted led to winning the engine contract for the Joint Strike Fighter, the operating system for Detroit Edison, and the Navy’s high velocity learning line of effort—an initiative led by the Chief of Naval Operations. A pilot with a pharma company cut the time for the ‘hit to lead’ phase in early stage drug discovery from twelve months to six.   Spear has published in Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, Health Services Research, Harvard Business Review, Academic Administrator, and the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings He invented the patented See to Solve Real Time Alert System and is principal investigator for new research on making critical decisions when faced with hostile data.  He’s supervised more than 40 theses and dissertations. He holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton and worked at the University of Tokyo, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment and Prudential Bache.   LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stevespear Email: steve@hvellc.com Website: thehighvelocityedge.com   You’ll Learn About: The dire consequences when traditional retailers were late creating competitive eCommerce capabilities. Creating dynamic learning organizations. How fast feedback creates opportunities to self correct and improve in real time How the US Navy’s Battle of Midway compares to how organizations are responding to digital disruption today. Episode Timeline: [00:10] Intro [01:23] Dr. Steve Spear’s speech [01:44] What did I accomplish? [02:39] What did I discover today? [03:45] Start point with ignorance [05:21] High velocity learning [06:52] Courtney Kissler and Nordstrom [08:09] Steve’s examples of finding a potential solution [18:53] The Machine That Changed the World  [19:57] High velocity learning is mother of all solutions [23:13] Shattered Sword [29:45] Homework: Garner feedback and make it better [30:59] The importance of high velocity outcomes [35:06] Steve’s ask for help [37:37] See to Solve [38:30] Steve’s presentation at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 [45:34] Digital disruption [47:17] Bringing the whole Navy to solve the problem [50:00] Combat information center [53:30] Greyhound [54:48] Innovation across a group of ships [58:47] Back to Midway [1:01:23] Contrast between Japanese’s and American’s Naval doctrine plans [1:04:17] Steve’s last encouragement [1:04:32] Gene’s two observations [1:08:32] Outro RESOURCES Dr. Steven Spear’s DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 London - Virtual presentation - enter your email address to watch The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Dr. Steve Spear Reed Hastings’ quote The Machine That Changed the World: Based on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 5-Million-Dollar 5-Year Study on the Future of the Automobile by Dr. James P. Womack, Dr. Daniel T Jones and Dr. Daniel Roos Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway: The Japanese Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully  See to Solve Many of the concepts in this talk were explored by Trent Hone's fantastic book: Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898–1945 by Trent Hone The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis and Jez Humble Greyhound