Are we too SMART in our goals?

When setting goals, we have all been taught to use the acronym SMART. Of course, SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound, just in case you forgot. We run our products, programs, and even our companies by this acronym. On top of this or an adjacent thought is the linear thinking of “cause Read More …

Leaders Developing Employees

In talking to Dan Markovitz, author of the new book Building the Fit Organization: Six Core Principles for Making Your Company Stronger, Faster, and More Competitive, I get the feeling that of the six principles in his book that the last chapter on The Coaching Triangle is the most important. An excerpt from this weeks Read More …

Forming Expectations Through Promises

“If you can trust a promise, you can save a lot of time and effort. It helps you to form expectations, and that expectation is knowledge that you build up by having a relationship with something or some process or some personal device.” – Mark Burgess Related Podcasts and Transcription: The Theory of a Promise Read More …

Designing through Promises

Mark Burgess is perhaps best known as the author of the popular configuration management software package CFEngine, but has also made important contributions to the theory of the field of automation and policy based management, including the idea of operator convergence and promise theory. Mark is the author of numerous books, articles, and papers on Read More …

From Thinking About Things

From Thinking About Things to Thinking About Relationships. The readers of my blog will recognize many of the terms Jeff Sussna used throughout the book, Service Design, Service Dominant Logic, Jobs to be Done, and Design Thinking, I asked if he had an underlying thread to all of it? Related Podcast and Transcription: Digital Services Read More …

Does Autonomy lead to Greater Clarity?

Mark Burgess is a theoretician and practitioner in the area of information systems, whose work has focused largely on distributed information infrastructure. He is known particularly for his work on Configuration Management and Promise Theory. He was the principal Founder of CFEngine, and is emeritus professor of Network and System Administration from Oslo University College. Read More …