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Ikea, Lego, and Volvo Just Identified 4 Radical Ways to Hack Management

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There's a lot to learn from watching innovation outside of Silicon Valley.     By Soren Kaplan   Author, The Invisible Advantage @ sorenkaplan   WRITE A COMMENT     CREDIT: Getty Images     We've heard a lot about the business practices of the tried and true American innovators like  Apple ,  Google , and  Facebook . But there's also a lot of innovation happening outside of Silicon Valley, let alone the U.S. And we can learn from it all. So where do you look? Some of the most progressive social policies have originated in Scandinavia -- specifically Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Sweden, for example, gives up to 480 days of leave per child, which can be taken all at once or split up between parents over time as paid time off until the child is 8 years old. The country also covers a significant port...
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Project management: A surefire way to kill your software product

For many years, I have observed that the quality of software produced by organizations is a decreasing function of their emphasis on project management over business value creation—that is, their obsession with predictability and efficiency over learning and adapting. Software development is fundamentally an exercise in  learning , while the traditional  command-and-control  style of project management seeks to optimize the execution of known, repeatable processes at scale. For software development, no significant developer activity is predictable or repetitive; if it were, the developers would have  automated  it already. In addition, learning is essentially a nonlinear process; it involves trying things that don’t work in order to discover what does work. You might see linear progress for a while, but you don’t know what you don’t know, so there will be apparent setbacks. It is from these setbacks that one learns the truth about the system—what is r...
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