140 Second Presentation: Inspire with AMIs

It’s all about inspiration!

A few decades ago, writer and poet Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

In my opinion it’s not actions what people are looking for, but inspiration. That’s what I like about Stoos Connect: it inspires people all over the world to yearn for new management ideas.

Therefore we came up with the term Agile Management Innovations, or short AMI (which sounds like the name Amy, like Amy Winehouse or Amy Farrah Fowler, which means “The beloved one”, which I find kinda nice).

Here comes a selection of a few AMIs:

• Open Books, which means: Business figures are accessible by employees, and employees are trained to understand these business figures.
• Slow Communication, which means: Way of communicating asynchronously to have more uninterrupted flow moments.
• Konsent, which means: Form of decision making within teams or whole organisation where a decision is made when nobody has a reasoned veto.
• Mentoring and Coaching, which means: Mentors help employees to find their next career steps, and coaches help employees to grow personally.
• Work on Sight, which means: Every employee has contact with the customer.

So these were a few AMIs. These are not practices though! If you ask e.g. Wiktionary, it describes “practice” as the “repetition of an activity to improve skill.” But according to Gary Hamel, who invented the term management innovation, you can just practice something like e.g. “open books” within a company. That’s because 50% of the impact of something like “open books” depends upon the culture of the organisation. That’s why it’s called management innovations, because every time you try something like “open books” within your company, you have to invent it within the given boundaries. That’s why we shouldn’t tell people what to do, but just inspire them. And because I have an Agile mindset, we described Agile Management Innovations.

Saint-Exupery also said: “True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.” So please, people all over the world: inspire others, to spread joy and happiness!

This is my text of the 140 Second Presentation of the Stoos Connect event in Amsterdam, which I held at the Melbourne Stoos Connect Live Stream event in the middle of the night at 3 o’clock in the morning.

There’s also a longer text on the topic of AMIs, if you like to read more about it.

Thanks a lot to Erwin van der Koogh for such a fantastic event and a great inspiration!