Jurgen Appelo Quotes & Sayings

Shareholder value is an outcome - not a strategy" [BusinessWeek 2009]. — Jurgen Appelo

The ultimate test of agility is whether you can keep all your stakeholders happy. — Jurgen Appelo

a management practice is a good practice when: It engages people and their interactions; It enables them to improve the system; It helps to delight all clients. — Jurgen Appelo

One conclusion is becoming more and more evident: The primary focus of any manager should be to energize people, to make sure that they actually want to do all that stuff. And doing all that stuff requires motivation. — Jurgen Appelo

when organizations adopt Agile practices, it is imperative that team leaders and development managers learn a better approach to leading and managing their teams. — Jurgen Appelo

Before you try to measure someone else's performance, please explain how you measure your own. — Jurgen Appelo

Innovation is not only useless without people but it's also useless without implementation. — Jurgen Appelo

As a change agent it is important to value all discussions, the good ones and the bad ones. Because, when people criticize what you're doing, it means they care about the topic. — Jurgen Appelo

Healthier organizations are possible when you stop comparing them with machines and, instead, compare them with communities. — Jurgen Appelo

Motivation is a fine example of social complexity. It is nonlinear and sometimes unpredictable. It cannot be defined or modeled with a single diagram. — Jurgen Appelo

Your career is your own responsibility. Your employer is not your mother. — Jurgen Appelo

Seriously, I don't see the difference between blaming the system and blaming other people. It seems to me it's all the same, as long as workers are not blaming themselves! — Jurgen Appelo

There's no shortcut to an optimized whole and no complex system will ever really be optimal. — Jurgen Appelo

To the inexperienced and naive, creativity often looks like magic. But in truth creativity is rooted in the fertile grounds of knowledge and many hours of hard work and thinking. — Jurgen Appelo

The hardest part of continuous improvement in organizations is changing the behavior of other people. — Jurgen Appelo

A complex system benefits from not following the same practices over and over again. By enduring a little bit of stress and continuously adapting to variability in the environment, the system learns to become fitter and healthier. — Jurgen Appelo

The world is too complex to give you merely a list of practices to follow. What managers in the 21st century need most is insight so that they can develop their own prescriptions for their own particular needs — Jurgen Appelo

Management is 5% instruction and 95% communication. — Jurgen Appelo

Delegation is not a binary thing. There are shades of grey between a dictatorship and an anarchy. — Jurgen Appelo

The lack of short-term stress results in a lack of long-term health. When you always protect a human body from harm, you grow it to be fragile. — Jurgen Appelo

One important insight is that all organizations are networks. People may draw their organizations as hierarchies, but that doesn't change that they are actually networks. — Jurgen Appelo

Some people believe linking to Wikipedia is bad practice, but I disagree. I'd rather link directly to a topic that is continuously being improved than referring to part of a dead tree that is hard to obtain because it is either expensive or out of stock. — Jurgen Appelo