Feb 26, 2020 | 3 min read

Rituals to Cultivate a Fearless Culture with Gene Kim

By: Patrick Emmons

Rituals to Cultivate a Fearless Culture with Gene Kim

The seeds of innovation cannot germinate in a culture in which people feel they need to ask permission. According to today's guest, Gene Kim, the ability to fail — and share that failure — is one of the most important tenets of any company that has a chance to improve.

Gene has been studying high-performing technology companies since 1999 and has authored several books on the topic. In this week’s episode of Innovation and the Digital Enterprise, Gene discusses the five central prerequisites of company innovation as well as the role that ritual can play in de-stigmatizing failure.

Check out this episode for practical tips on how your company can achieve substantial results simply by changing up habits.

  • [00:25] - This week: Gene Kim
  • [01:40] - The Unicorn Project
  • [07:11] - Celebrating bad news
  • [09:53] - Processes and bureaucracies
  • [12:49] - The Five Ideals
  • [22:04] - Habits and rewards
  • [27:30] - New modes of management and production
  • [32:15] - Fostering innovation at the edges
  • [36:35] - Diversity in teams
  • [39:41] - Humble expertise

Gene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and author, and has been studying high performing technology organizations since 1999. He was the founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written six books, including The Unicorn Project (2019), The Phoenix Project (2013), The DevOps Handbook (2016), the Shingo Publication Award-winning Accelerate (2018), and The Visible Ops Handbook (2004-2006) series. Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of the DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

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This podcast episode was produced by Dante32.

About Patrick Emmons

If you can’t appreciate a good sports analogy, movie quote, or military reference, you may not want to work with him, but if you value honesty, integrity, and commitment to improvement, Patrick can certainly help take your business or your career to the next level. “Good enough,” is simply not in his vernacular. Pat’s passion is for relentlessly pushing himself and others to achieve full potential. Patrick Emmons is a graduate of St. Norbert College with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. Patrick co-founded Adage Technologies in 2001 and in 2015, founded DragonSpears as a spin-off dedicated to developing custom applications that improve speed, compliance and scalability of clients’ internal and customer-facing workflow processes. When he is not learning about new technology, running a better business, or becoming a stronger leader, he can be found coaching his kids’ (FIVE of them) baseball and lacrosse teams and praising his ever-so-patient wife for all her support.

Recent Episodes

We interview leaders from early-stage start-ups to billion-dollar enterprises who distill their lessons from their victories and their failures. Learn how these high-performing leaders organize their teams, establish a growth-minded culture, and leverage new technologies such as DevOps and Cloud.