I was recently introduced to a new non-profit organization Change This. They claim to be creating a new kind of media – through PDF and Blog distribution to challenge the way ideas are created and spread. I was attracted to this site because of my propensity in dealing with change. Adapt or die.

While PDF distribution is not new, and you may even claim that blogging is not new, Change This has pulled together a fairly respectable set to materials from some of the thought leaders in business, culture, politics and technology. Leaders like Tom Peters, Seth Godin and others who have written the books have contributed to their site.

One “manifesto” (as they title their PDF files) that triggered some of my agile executive instincts was from Tom Peters (one of my favorite authors) entitled This I Believe – Tom’s 60 TIBs. In it, Tom lists marketing, strategy and other big ideas in leading business. I know many are tired of the List publishing, but when you don’t have time to read the books, lists from great minds provide opportunities to quickly take stock in your daily activities.

As I work with executives, I often coach them through organizational changes and the transitions required to achieve the business value they are seeking. This means becoming an adaptive organization, embracing change and distributing decisions. This manifesto articulates many of the organizational characteristics we teach.

I have pulled a few (of the many brilliant) excerpts from Tom’s work as it applies to executives embracing change in your organizations. There is a LOT more in the actual manifesto and I encourage you to download it and read it. Whether or not you consider yourself agile, or want to convert to an agile enterprise – these axioms apply to all businesses today.

9. Everything is up for grabs! Volatility is they name!
These are not times for the faint of heart. They call for the maximum from each and every one of us…No right answers or certain rules are on the horizon. We must make it up as we go along…In short: We must all become…Re-imagineers.

11. “Permanence” is a snare and a delusion
Put your all into surviving today’s tsunamis of change…and let the day after tomorrow take care of itself.

12. Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) is...Very Dangerous Stuff
Now excellence has become transient (few teams win back-to-back championships in sports, the competition and rate of improvement have become so intense); and the fact is that the Pursuit of Perfection (at today’s “sport”) gets in the way of ferreting out the Next Big Thing.

14. Forget it!
The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.

15. Innovation = Easy. (True.)
Self-motivated change is virtually impossible, particularly if the individual or enterprise is, shall we say, mature. (Or, worse yet, successful.) Thence the “answer” (only?) to change is to throw yourself violently in harm’s way. I.e.: Put yourself in a position where you have no option but to change.

19. Action…ALWAYS…takes precedence
We put too much emphasis on analysis, too little emphasis on “gettin’ on with gettin’ on.”

20. He who makes the quickest, coolest prototypes reigns!
Stories-Heroes-Demos…not Plans…make the world go ‘round. We need to see-it-to-believe-it. Or, early on, see-it-to-become-inflamed-by-the-potential-of-it.

21. Haste makes waste
Failure is the mother (father, and uncle) of success. Embrace failure.

22. Screw-ups are…THE…Mark of Excellence
(Corollary: “Do it right the first time” is an…Obscenity.)
From premier product developer David Kelley: “Fail Faster. Succeed sooner.” From a Philadelphia area high-tech executive: “Fail. Forward. Fast.”

27. S-H-E is the best leader
Judy Rosener lays it out brilliantly in America’s Competitive Secret: Women Managers. Women, she enumerates, tend to: link rather than rank workers…favor an interactive/collaborative leadership style, believe that empowerment beats top-down decision making…sustain fruitful collaborations…are comfortable sharing information…see re-distribution of power as victory, not surrender…favor multidimensional feedback…value technical and interpersonal skills equally; individual and group contributions equally…readily accept ambiguity…honor intuition as well as pure rationality…are inherently flexible…and appreciate cultural diversity. (PETE NOTE: I included this one for Tom's example of the best leader characteristics - all are highlighted in an agile implementation)

39. There is (Perhaps?!) only…One Big Issue
Crappy X-Functional Communications. Consider this, from Frank Lekanne Deprez and René Tissen in Zero Space: Moving Beyond Organizational Limits: “The organizations we created have become tyrants. They have taken control, holding us fettered, creating barriers that hinder rather than help our businesses. The lines that we drew on our neat organizational diagrams have turned into walls that no one can scale or penetrate or even peer over.”

50. Boss mantra No. 1: “I Don’t Know”
I hate the term “empowerment.” I love the idea of…“I don’t know.” Empowerment typically translates into, “We the powerful deign to dribble some tantalizing drops of reluctantly granted freedom on the unwashed masses.” On the other hand, “I don’t know” from the mouth of the boss means: “I don’t know.”

51. Management Rule/Role No. 1: GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY
(“Manager” = Hurdle Removal Professional)
Peter Drucker once famously said, “Ninety percent of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.” Fact: Project teams pursuing exciting goals run into a thousand hurdles. In my experience, it’s seldom the Big Hurdles…that get them off track. Instead it’s a thousand “trivial” roadblocks…that torpedo the potentially Wow Project.

53. Change takes however long you think it takes
The query goes more or less like this: “So how long does it take to create an ‘empowerment
Program’ with teeth?” My answer: 17 years. Or: 17 days. Much (most?) of life is about self-fulfilling prophecy.

Don’t wait until it is too late to transform your agile organization.