What’s the difference between a methodology and a terrorist?

We took the Valize team on the road to attend this exclusive, high-level event. Here are a few snippets.

You can negotiate with a terrorist!

Ivar Jacobson was referring to the tendency for inventors of tools and methods to want to keep them proprietary. What this creates is confusion as similar tools doing similar things compete with one another, creating confusion. This comment was made during Day 2 of the World Agility Forum, when Jacobson was announcing a new initiative to make frameworks readily available. What he was getting at is the insistence that many have that their methodology is the One Best Way, when in fact there are many ways of getting to a final destination — it doesn’t all have to be one.

Jacobson and his colleague are setting up a system for practitioners of agile methods to share what works and put it into practice, which they call open source agility.

If you think innovation is risky, try stagnation!

This comment from my colleague Darrell Rigby (of Bain) captures the essence of what he and GE’s Kevin Nolan discussed with respect to the resurgence of GE Appliances (under the ownership of the Chinese innovator Haier), using innovation to completely rethink how the brand is built.

Nolan described how he and his colleagues created an innovation incubator called FirstBuild, inspired by the experiences of makers working on passion projects of their own. He recalled visiting such a lab in his hometown of Louisville, only to find a couple of GE engineers there who flinched when they saw him turn up. “Wait a minute,” he recalls thinking. “These guys are putting up with their time with me, only to turn right around and go to “work’ at this other place because they are finding it more interesting. What is wrong with this picture?”

FirstBuild was an outgrowth of a moment (well, several actually) of desperation for GE. The appliance division had been up for sale for some time and in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession…