Even in these tough times, surprising and extraordinary efforts are under way in businesses across the globe. From politics to technology, energy, and transportation; from marketing to retail, health care, and design, each company on the following pages illustrates the power and potential of innovative ideas and creative execution. These are the kinds of enterprises that will redefine our future and point the way to a better tomorrow.

(Second, in this company at least,) junior executives, women, and members of the salesforce were the key actors in bridging the silos in the firm.

The nature of corporations as they grow is to become glacial and bureaucratic because no one trusts anyone. You spend half the day reporting on what you do so execs higher up can keep an eye on you because they believe that some how, you're out to destroy the company. And probably, some number of employees are. Or at the very least, not working up to their potential. Here's an idea, do some careful hiring and recruiting, hire people who are excellent at their jobs AND have some moral fiber, and set them loose to do what you hired them for. No one gets hired to fill out status reports, but that's mostly what we all end up doing. So the good people leave for greener, entrepreneurial pastures, and the people happy about status reports stay, get promoted and the whole thing perpetuates itself until you have Yahoo, GM or any other number of glacial bureauracracies.

the only value of valleywag hides in the comments.

• Create a sustainable business model that can be adopted and adapted by others.
• Create a fair and democratic company that is owned by the workers.
• Have long-term, trustworthy and meaningful relationships with our staff and customers.

Nice essay about how to found a company and rule it.

After all, a cargo cult shop is imitating what they have seen about agile. However, like waterfall proponents, cargo cult agile shops are led by people who have looked at pictures of agile models, "read" agile books, or "learned" agile development from PowerPoint presentations. Perhaps there are a number of developers who know agile, but they may not be able to move the company towards agility in the face of generations of managers and developers who have been indoctrinated by DoD-2167.

the story of my life

They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

because old advices are even more precious when they are old.

This book aims to give you a head start by providing a detailed down-to-earth account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a team of approximately 40 people and how they continuously improved their process over a year's time.

another (free as in beer) book to read