60 agile pros tell me what really matters in agile today
Despite what you might have heard, agile is alive, well, and solving some serious problems across the world of business, tech, and beyond
Are managers really as horrible as you think?
There’s a real difference between “leading” and “managing”. Understand it, and you’ll have a good shot at excelling in either role.
What Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb teach us about hiring for experience
In this era of digital disruption, curiosity and initiative matter more than deep expertise.
How to get peer feedback that will dramatically improve your work
Let peers challenge your ideas and inspire new ones.
How to prepare for the remote-friendly future of work
Three investments to make in anticipation of the highly-distributed future of work. And they won’t cost you a penny.
New research shows great customer experience doesn’t come from bots
Forget chatbots. New research shows employee empowerment is still the key to delivering a great customer experience.
Productivity data proves stand-ups aren’t just for coders anymore
Poor communication and wasted work are toxic for any team – but there’s an easy solution.
3 myths that explain why innovation fails
Businesses are terrible at innovating. Sure, recruiters promise innovative jobs, companies claim to sell innovative merchandise, and shareholders rave about innovation. But most of these promises are hollow. (And deep down, we all know it.) That spells trouble for anyone competing in a well-established market space. You can’t be a little bit different or a little […]
10 ways to tell if your team trusts you as a leader
Trust makes your job as a leader easier in just about every way possible. Your teams make decisions faster (and revisit them less often). People pro-actively admit to and learn from mistakes instead of scrambling to hide them. It’s easy enough to know your own level of trust in the people you lead. But gauging […]
Feeling scattered? Regain your focus with these 5 rituals
[cta]If there’s anyone out there not feeling dizzy after a topsy-turvy 2017, I’ll eat my hat. (Also, would you please share the secret to your serenity?) Between the debate over remote work, Facebook’s near-daily changes affecting branded content, and the fact that robots might take our jobs, we’re being pulled in a hundred different directions. Not to […]
What workplace trends will we see 2018? Here are our predictions
As Atlassian’s Work Futurist, I think a lot about what’s coming next. But, I’m not the only one at Atlassian who has grand visions for the future. In fact, our predictions started long ago, when our co-Founder Scott Farquhar was only 12 years old. As a youngster, Scott made some technology forecasts that have nearly […]
5 habits to drop immediately for a successful 2018
[cta]It’s no secret that our world moves quickly. Start-ups launch at a rate of about 1240 per day in the U.S. alone. New technologies pop up faster than toadstools after rain and change the way we think about pretty much everything. Geographies previously thought of as “remote” are now connected and ready to buy. In such a volatile business […]
When companies ban remote work in the name of collaboration, what are they really saying?
[cta]The debate over remote work rages on. At the heart of the issue is collaboration and, by extension, creativity, and innovation. How well can teammates really work together when they’re not in the same building? Don’t we need that intense level of interaction to spark new ideas? Surely, teams are more effective when they’re sitting side by […]
Forget about “fail fast” – just fail well
Go ahead, include it with the others. “Fail” has gone full buzzword. Shield your eyes (if you can) from the event banners, the blog post headers, the office posters, all with “fail” and “fail fast” writ large. Can’t we do better than grease the wheels of the failure bandwagon? Let’s forget failure. What matters is […]
3 ways to improve collaboration by putting culture first
When I see high-performing teams working well together, I can attribute it to the people, tools, and practices every time. When I see dysfunctional teams, they almost always have the same tools as their high-performing counterparts. The difference is in the people and practices. In an age where work is increasingly about creative problem-solving (i.e., now and the […]