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Practice the Art of Creative Management

The Management Principle

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Abstract

There is a paradox at the heart of modern management: balancing management control with creative freedom. It is also the central management challenge for becoming a software company. If the teams must operate at their creative best, the management has to learn to become creative as well. They have to learn build organic control, and not reply on the mechanistic control of the bureaucratic process. They have to focus on making new actions attractive, instead of breaking resistance to change of old actions. They have to prioritize learning and embrace emergent outcomes of the self organized teams.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of Basecamp, refers to commonly used JIRA-type backlog management as “ticket treadmills.”

  2. 2.

    Gareth Morgan provides a more modern analysis in his 1986 book Images of Organization.

  3. 3.

    The Flow Principle, Chapter 6.

  4. 4.

    The Stack Principle, Chapter 4.

  5. 5.

    The Team Principle, Chapter 7.

  6. 6.

    The Value Principle, Chapter 2.

  7. 7.

    The Flow Principle, Chapter 6.

  8. 8.

    The Complexity Principle, Chapter 3.

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Sidhu, A. (2023). Practice the Art of Creative Management. In: Becoming a Software Company. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9169-6_8

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