Karim Harbott

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:35

Kareem, how did you meet Mike Beale?

Karim Harbott  00:38

I met Mike. I traveled to Berlin, I believe it was to take his enterprise scrum course. So a few of us went out there, VCST’s and CECs. And we went out to because I heard he created this thing. And I thought oh, that sounds interesting. And I’ll go and do that. And so we sat through his course. And we spent we went out a few times in evenings. And so that was where I initially met him. It was a really interesting couple of days and then worked with him subsequently. After that, but yeah, it was kind of spur of the moment thing really. But I’m glad I went for sure.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:18

This is a reoccurring theme where people talk about going with Mike, to dinners and it seems like he was big on these dinners. And people have described him in a similar way. But what was your take and how would you describe my both in class, as well as in these like more of a social after the training events?

Karim Harbott  01:44

He is passionate, right? He was passionate about business and about business agility, enterprise agility, but he’s is passionate about so many things right. And of you never had a dull time when you’re around Mike something interesting will always happen, interesting conversation or some interesting food or some exotic cocktails or whatever it was. It was never going to be just another night when you’re out with Mike. And I think that was the same with his work. Right? It was never just another class, he would always have an interesting spin on it. That was, you know, a lot of ways ahead of his time. So you’re always learning from Mike for sure.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  02:28

What are some of the things that you took from him in a sense of like, oh, this is a new way of thinking or maybe just the way that he impacted you. And the way that you look at things.

Karim Harbott  02:40

Yeah, he’s kind of one of the pivotal people in my career. Because at the time, I was I don’t know, I always been a scrum person. And I was teaching less large scale Scrum. But product development and software in particular for me, right, so software development, product development teams, one team, multiple teams, programs, and beyond. But Mike encouraged and challenged me to take what I was doing in that space and apply it to the whole organization, which I was aware of was happening and was necessary. But I’ve never really gone down that road in earnest. And it was after his enterprise scrum class where, you know, he was talking about in his words subsumption. Right. But well, we can just call that inspect and adapt on multiple levels, including at the organizational level. And actually creating truly agile organizations or business agility is the term I would use now. And I’ve never really gone down that road and it was after a few conversations with Mike that I thought, you know, what, actually, we can just create organizations that can create whole new products, services and whole business models, while still operating with what they do. And that was a big impact on me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:59

What other ways like did enterprise scrum specifically, like, impacted the way that you look at frameworks and how much do you see of enterprise scrum in current frameworks? Because at that time you didn’t see as many maybe it was less, maybe a little bit of safe. I mean, that was, I guess, you know, but the scaling, I guess, was just starting to, probably…

Karim Harbott  04:30

Yeah, so you see bits of it. And I think for me, the strength of it was kind of the idea, right? It was that we can apply these things more broadly than at the product level. And at the center of it was the canvases right, he was really big on creating canvases and you can inspect and adapt on the product on a cadence around this big visual canvas and previously, I’d been a fan of the business model canvas and it fit quite nicely into that. And it was a big influence to me when I created the business agility Canvas because I was thinking about how can we visualize the transformation across all areas of the organization. So, you know, I come at it from a slightly different angle, but I mean, there’s no doubt that the canvases and the entier subsumption that might use to talk about in enterprise scrum has made its way into many different areas now, particularly my work but lots of work to so and I really enjoyed the visual elements of the canvases and the fact that we can all get around and talk about how various parts of this organization fit together. And that’s incredibly powerful.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:41

Yeah, and just visualizing work, I think just there are so people that I spoke and been talking to about Mike and one of the things that keeps coming, you know, which is, you know, what was he saying? Like, you know, idolize everything or something like that, and then also visualize everything. Do you remember any stories that Mike would tell that still stick around? Like, do you remember anything that he said, or some of his experiences that..

Karim Harbott  06:20

So I used to talking to him about the kind of the lead up and the kind of the aftermath of that Snowbird meeting in 2001. And I learned a lot about what was going on at the time from Mike. But there’s a quote that sticks in my head, and I say it in almost every one of my leadership courses, and he used to say it all the time, I tried to find it written down somewhere when I referenced it in my book, but he obviously didn’t write it down. He said, it’s easier to grow a unicorn than to transform a dinosaur. And he used to say it all the time. And I had it in my head. And as I started thinking, well, actually how many unicorns appear each year? Right? It’s a lot, and how many big traditional organizations truly reinvent themselves to be agile organizations. Maybe, you know, Satya Nadella to a certain extent with Microsoft and, highup potentially, but actually, there really aren’t very many of those. So and the more I think about it, the more I think you know what, he’s actually right, it maybe is easier to grow a unicorn than to transform a dinosaur. And then I start thinking, well, why don’t I just grow a unicorn, then instead of trying to help transform? I would be a lot more interesting. But yeah, that’s one of the quotes that stick with me the most from Mike.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  07:40

That is interesting. Because yeah, I mean, like, but what do you do? Like when the most of the world is dinosaurs? In a sense, they just let him die out. What was his take on it? Like, was it more, I mean, he talked about agility across the whole organization, business agility, he was probably one of the first people in our circles to talk about business agility. What was his take on like, changing the world and dealing with dinosaurs versus creating unicorns? I mean,

Karim Harbott  08:14

His take was that a lot of them are going to die out, right, the dinosaurs died out, right? Apart from some birds and some will be able to reinvent themselves, and the rest will die out. Because the organizations that are growing, that are being born, they are born with business agility in their veins. And so they have to go through a big transformation, right? They already are agile. And so you’re competing with those people now. And you are going start to struggle, and I think the next 5 to 10 years, we’ll see more and more of them disappear. And we’ll see more and more of these agile organizations appearing. So it’s going to be less a case of reinventing the old and more just that the new taking over. I think we’ll see a lot of those disappearing. And then I think he used to talk about, he used to predict that happening. And when it happens, who knows, but I think it’s coming for sure.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:06

Yeah, I agree. Definitely. I mean, like, it’s the environment is becoming so disruptive that like, if you can, you know, inspect and adapt quickly at organizational level, I joke around unless you’re government agency or insurance company, maybe a bank, but those are getting more and more pressure. So

Karim Harbott  09:30

yeah, where there are very high barriers to entry, you can get away with it, right. But those barriers are coming down and down and down. And suddenly you have these competitors. You know, I heard in the in the UK that one of the starter banks, the challenger banks, the so called Small challenger banks now has a bigger market capitalization and one of the big established retail banks like one of the four or five big high street. And you think that’s incredible. You never would have seen that coming five years ago. But in that short space of time, and what’s going to happen in the next five years, you know, these banks are going to have to update game right and he was talking about this all the time. And so it’s interesting to see it play out.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:07

Awesome. What would you like to finish with about Mike? What would, maybe to those that are listening anything that you would like to maybe conclude with? 

Karim Harbott  10:25

I did a CSPO for Mike once out in the US. And I remember saying to him, Mike if there’s any bit that you want to like kind of do because obviously Mike’s a CST, Mike, know scrum a bit. And I was like I’ll just put you in every now and then he said yeah, sure, sure. And quite early on. I was doing the bit about, talked about traditional project management, and then they started to do the bit about the manifesto and how 17 guys came together. And the breakout and I was about to do the Snowbird thing. Maybe you should do this bit given you were there, and he just sat back and he just went, nah I want to watch you do it and then just laughed. Talk about intimidating. I had only been a CST for not very long. And then suddenly I’ve got to teach a whole bunch of students about the manifesto and Mike sitting right at the front grinning at me. I was like thank you, thank you for that. But I realized that was he was he like to have fun as well as well as work hard. So I survived it and apparently I got it pretty much right