Brent. Brent, Brent, Brent! Can’t we do anything without him? Look at us! We’re trying to have a management discussion about commitments and resources, and all we do is talk about one guy! I don’t care how talented he is. If you’re telling me that our organization can’t do anything without him, we’ve got a big problem.” Wes.

— Gene Kim

Gene Kim Quotes

In high-performing organizations, everyone within the team shares a common goal – quality, availability, and security aren’t the responsibility of individual departments, but are a part of everyone’s job, every day.

— Gene Kim

Unplanned work is what prevents you from doing it. Like matter and antimatter, in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury, incinerating everything around it.

— Gene Kim

CIO stands for “Career Is Over.

— Gene Kim

The only thing more dangerous than a developer is a developer conspiring with Security.

— Gene Kim

Ask a programmer to review ten lines of code, he’ll find ten issues. Ask him to do five hundred lines, and he’ll say it looks good.

— Gene Kim

Programming

It’s difficult to overstate the enormity of this problem – it affects every organization, independent of the industry we operate in, the size of our organization, whether we are profit or non-profit. Now more than ever, how technology work is managed and performed predicts whether our organizations will win in the marketplace, or even survive.

— Gene Kim

Situations like this only reinforce my deep suspicion of developers: They’re often carelessly breaking things and then disappearing, leaving Operations to clean up the mess.

— Gene Kim

If you can’t out-experiment and beat your competitors in time to market and agility, you are sunk. Features are always a gamble. If you’re lucky, ten percent will get the desired benefits. So the faster you can get those features to market and test them, the better off you’ll be. Incidentally, you also pay back the business faster for the use of capital, which means the business starts making money faster, too.

— Gene Kim

In any value stream, there is always a direction of flow, and there is always one and only constraint; any improvement not made at that constraint is an illusion.

— Gene Kim

There should be absolutely no way that the Dev and QA environments don’t match the production environment.

— Gene Kim

Left unchecked, technical debt will ensure that the only work that gets done is unplanned work!

— Gene Kim

What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another. It can be a powerful thing when that magic dynamic exists.

— Gene Kim

By relentless and constant experimentation in their daily work, they were able to continually increase capacity, often without adding any new equipment or hiring more people.

— Gene Kim

It’s not the upfront capital that kills you, it’s the operations and maintenance on the back end.

— Gene Kim

There’s a very real cognitive and spiritual burden of having to carry so many unfulfilled promises forever into the future, where anyone can ask at any time “Where is my feature?

— Gene Kim

Goldratt taught us that in most plants, there are a very small number of resources, whether it’s men, machines, or materials, that dictates the output of the entire system. We call this the constraint – or bottleneck. Either.

— Gene Kim

I’m starting to associate the smell of pizza with the futility of a death march.

— Gene Kim

Punishing failure and “shooting the messenger” only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.

— Gene Kim

Brent. Brent, Brent, Brent! Can’t we do anything without him? Look at us! We’re trying to have a management discussion about commitments and resources, and all we do is talk about one guy! I don’t care how talented he is. If you’re telling me that our organization can’t do anything without him, we’ve got a big problem.” Wes.

— Gene Kim

Trying to get a Phoenix build going is like playing Legend of Zelda, if it were written by a sadist, forcing her to adventure far and wide to find hidden keys scattered across the kingdom and given only measly clues from uncaring NPCs. But when you finally finish the level, you can’t actually play the next level – you have to mail paper coupons to the manufacturer and wait weeks to get the activation codes.

— Gene Kim

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