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Look at what you have access to right now. Libraries. Schools and universities. A phone in your pocket that can open almost any book, lecture, or course ever recorded. Online courses that take what an expert learned over ten or twenty years and compress it into a weekend. No generation in history has had more…

It usually starts on a Sunday evening, at the kitchen table. Let’s call them Mark and Sara. They sit down with a notebook to plan the year, and within ten minutes the list looks like this: Replace the old windows before winter Take the kids on a proper summer vacation Replace the car, which has…

The chip in your phone may have crossed more borders than you did on your last vacation. Its design may have started in the United States. The machine used to manufacture its most microscopic features may have come from a Dutch company. Some of its materials may have come from China or Japan. It may…

There’s a scene in Die Hard with a Vengeance where John McClane and Zeus Carver are standing next to a bomb in Central Park. The bomb is wired to a scale. Two empty water jugs sit nearby: one holds 5 gallons, the other holds 3. Neither jug has a single marking on it.The instructions are…

Here’s a question for you. If you had exactly one chance, one single measurement, to catch a liar hiding among a group of honest people, could you do it? Sounds impossible. But there’s an old TV detective puzzle that proves you can, and once you see how, you’ll never look at Planning Poker the same…

Volkswagen is selling cars. Its revenue is basically flat. Automotive cash flow has improved by billions. Its new electric models have attracted more than 70,000 orders within weeks of launch. And its CEO just told employees, in an internal memo obtained by Reuters, that “the situation is more than critical.” How can both of those…

If you are leading or participating in an SAP project and still thinking in terms of Business Blueprint documents, you must be ready for a major change in how you work. SAP Activate was introduced as the successor to ASAP back in 2013, and since then, it has been the recommended, actively developed implementation approach,…

Your Product Owner tells the team in Monday’s planning that everything’s on track. Then in Thursday’s leadership sync, she tells her director the team missed two sprint goals in a row and it’s a delivery risk. Nobody in that meeting hears your side of it. So you talk to her privately. You stay calm, you’re…

The Problem Imagine this scenario. A client has contracted for the development of a new IT system. The implementer, as part of their obligation, creates a functional specification and submits it to the client for review. The client forms a Team of about ten people for this purpose, tasked with verifying that the document correctly…

Imagine you’re about to build a Scrum Team for a critical project. You have room for only four people. Then someone shows you this picture. An older woman. A pregnant woman. A young man using crutches. A mother carrying a sleeping child. And asks one uncomfortable question: Who would you remove from your Scrum Team?…