Lean Marketers should read Radical Management

Steve Denning has written an excellent book portraying Lean and Agile techniques to the practice of management. Many of his thoughts parallel mine though I am only viewing these techniques from a sales and marketing perspective. His seven principles depicted below is the essence of the thoughts in the book. The book is well written, researched and referenced. Not sure traditional agile people will find anything in the book new or earth shattering though they will see how agile can be transformed into a true management philosophy.

I am not sure that I agree with Steve that the thoughts are that radical but I do believe that it is a significant cultural shift for most organizations. When you consider that the traditional organizational hierarchy was developed over a 100 years ago, maybe we are ready for a change?

Book Description: Radical management is a way of organizing and managing work that leads to high productivity, deep job satisfaction, continuous innovation and client delight. It is discussed in Steve Denning’s new book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century, published by Jossey-Bass in October 2010.

What are the seven principles of radical management? The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management describes seven basic principles of continuous innovation, along with more than seventy supporting practices. Radical management is a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter-locking principles.

The goal of work is to delight clients. Radical management aims at delighting clients and focuses, not just the marketing department, but the entire organization on this goal.
Work is conducted in self-organizing teams. Self-organizing teams draw on the full talents and inspiration of the people doing the work.
Teams operate in client-driven iterations. Client-driven iterations are key, because delighting clients can only be approached through successive approximations.
Each iteration delivers value to clients. Client-driven iterations focus on delivering value to clients by the end of each iteration. This forces closure and enables frequent client feedback.
Managers foster radical transparency. Self-organizing teams—working in an iterative fashion—in turn both enable and require radical transparency.
Managers nurture continuous self-improvement. Continuous improvement means having the entire work force find better ways to give value to clients.
Managers communicating interactively, through stories, questions and conversations. An underlying requirement of all of these principles is interactive communication. Unless managers and workers are communicating interactively, using authentic narratives, open-ended questions and deep listening, rather than treating people as things to be manipulated, none of the above works.

P.S. What do you think of this Hitchcock movie?