Jonathan Sapir

"When change within your organization is slower than that without, you're in real trouble. We can't predict the future, but we can learn to react a lot faster than our adversaries." - Jack Welch If we try to build software solutions for highly paid knowledge workers who work in a rapidly changing environment in the same way that we build solutions for back office workers who work in predictable circumstances, we are doomed to failure. Freezing specifications, building software to fit those specs, and ignoring that business is constantly changing is a sure recipe for disaster. To achieve the levels of functionality, flexibility, and time-to-market required by business today, a radical shift is required in the way in which software is developed. This major shift is already well underway, with Web services and SOAs. But the technology alone will not make any serious im... (more)

Enabling the High Performance Corporation

To quote Peter Drucker: "The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the 50-fold increase in productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker." Unfortunately, to date, our efforts to improve the productivity of this increasingly important segment of the organization have been less than spectacular. As is pointed out in a recent study by the Center for High Perfo... (more)