With The
Culture Game: Tools for the Agile Manager, Daniel Mezick
has given organizations a set of not-so-secret success formulas. His
writing is crisp, cogent and to the point. Best example: his riposte to
people that check e-mail in meetings is “Give me a break”.
Best
of all, the advice is fully actionable. Right away. Anyone
can pick up a copy of Culture Game and, within a couple of hours,
brainstorm multiple ways to apply Agile thinking and Tribal Learning
Practices to their organization. This book is designed to give leaders
(and those aspiring to be leaders) the kinds of powerful business execution
techniques that elude most organizations. If you don’t recognize the
terms Agile or Tribal Leadership, check the links below for a quick
introduction.
I found the concepts of Culture Game to
be largely compatible with Morning Star’s philosophy of
Self-Management. Mezick’s first sentence in Chapter 22: Eliminate the distinction
between work and play—one of Morning Star’s central themes (one of
the first books in the Morning Star library was The Game of Work
by Charles Coonradt). Morning Star’s performance management system is
called Steppingstones—a set of visual scorecards for each business process
and each colleague playing the game of business. And, despite the
massive amounts of literature dedicated to achieving work/life balance, there
is really only life (unless people at work are actually zombies!). Why
not use games to make life at work as enjoyable as possible?
The author has a cohort of like-minded
thought leaders and fellow experimenters (including Robert Richman, former
head of Zappos Insights, and Michael Margolis, master storyteller), and he
draws them out skillfully in interviews. Throughout, he builds out
Agile principles in a logical sequence upon a solid foundation of history and
context, and does so in an authentic and entertaining way. He gives
full credit where credit is due, not only to Agile and Tribal Leadership, but
to every resource that defines and/or reinforces his principles (including
complexity theory, brain science, psychology, Toyota, systems theory, and
many others). As a reader, I appreciated the references and learned
where to go for more in-depth
information.
Daniel Mezick has comprehensively
defined the game of organizational culture. It’s safe to say that he,
like his book, is a real winner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_logan_on_tribal_leadership.html
