You say you want a revolution ...

Revolution and evolution. Destination and directions. Do not confuse your need to have a company or team vision with how they get there.

I always say that my goals are revolutionary and I make every attempt to have my methods be evolutionary. Sometimes even little common sense things can take a long time. When it comes to change, trust is key. When I took over the Solaris (TM) team at Sun, no one tracked progress of the team's efforts. I resisted instituting such a process until I had fought some battles on their behalf. Even then I posed it as a question to my staff "How can we know if our teams are working consistently and successfully?"

You need to think big and bold in order to ignite your team's imagination but you must translate those thoughts into practical tasks. Both thoughts and tasks are important. Did you ever try to give a driver step-by-step directions without them knowing the destination. It is unsettling and disconcerting for the driver. The same is true for your developers. If you cannot articulate your team's destination and your company's destination, they will be unsettled, less motivated, and more prone to leave.

Sometimes change is necessary to reach your destination. The ability to change is important to any organization. Brokering change is difficult. It takes time and patience. Most of the time you need to continue to produce product while you make change. It is akin, as one of my previous managers used to say, to figuring out how to re-tool the engine of an airplane mid-flight and still land on time. Do not underestimate what developers look at as change. From my understanding, before GE took on Six Sigma (TM) they developed a process to help adopt change because they knew they could not make the Six-Sigma-discovered changes without such a mechanism.

Think big and plan thoughtfully!

More later ...