On June 12, 2019, Steve Tendon was interviewed by Lean Epp, co-founder of Leanpub, in the Leanpub Frontmatter podcast.
Listen to the interview here: Steve Tendon, Author of Tame Your Work Flow .
The interview is broad and touches upon Steve’s history, career, and recent involvement with Blockchain technologies. Regarding the TameFlow Approach proper, Len asked Steve the following question/obervations:
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So you ended up working, you mentioned for Borland. What was it about Borland that made it so extraordinarily productive?
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One of the questions I was really looking forward to asking you, was about the transition from stage one to stage two of your career, when you went from software engineering to management consulting. Was it the thoughts that you were having based on your experience at Borland, and seeing the theory around Scrum developed, that led you to make the move from being a software engineer, to being someone who was sort of sitting on top of software engineers?
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What was the part of the due diligence experience for a merger that you were looking into?
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I think a lot of people– I mean even people who run companies or buy companies - might think that when you’re buying a software engineering team, you’re buying a bunch of typists. But in fact you’re buying a bunch of brains and processes and mindsets and a culture. It’s so interesting to me to hear you talk about how, when you’re engaging in this process of evaluating an organization like that, to go all the way from the very top level - from how it’s sort of run, to the actual code that’s being written - must have been a really fascinating challenge. And so, was it was it from this experience, that you developed the TameFlow approach to organizational knowledge work, performance in management?
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I came across a quote where you said, “Like Phlygeas taming the flow of waves on the river Styx, #tameflow will tame the flow of energy through your organization.” Was that story from Dante part of the inspiration for your. the name, “TameFlow?”
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How does your TameFlow approach deal with the fact that you sort of can’t see the work that’s being done in the same way in knowledge work, that you can in manufacturing?
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The idea of someone who’s so powerfully productive seems to me, that it must be related to some extent to the idea that - as a manager, you’re dealing with people who are better than you at what they’re doing - and know more than you do.
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The idea of creating this kind of coherence in a culture means that people can be given a great deal of independence and latitude to act, as long as you can trust that they’re going to be operating in accordance with the same model.
To get to know the answers, listen to Steve Tendon, Author of Tame Your Work Flow .