This episode dives into the Five Ideals, key principles for success in a digital age, as they are introduced with two eminent experts that Gene admires greatly. For years, Dr. Mik Kersten’s work on dev productivity and digital disruption informed many of the core concepts found in The Unicorn Project.

Peter Moore is a business strategy and technology advisor who specializes in helping companies compete in the age of digital disruption. Newly acquainted within the last year, Peter has already shared so much with Gene and Mik about how we can best use technology to win in the marketplace, from the business leadership perspective which is something every technology leader needs to know and embrace.

Dr. Mik Kersten started his career as a Research Scientist at Xerox PARC where he created the first aspect-oriented development environment. He then pioneered the integration of development tools with Agile and DevOps as part of his Computer Science PhD at the University of British Columbia. Founding Tasktop out of that research, Mik has written over one million lines of open-source code that is still in use today, and he has brought seven successful open-source and commercial products to market.

Mik’s experiences working with some of the largest digital transformations in the world has led him to identify the critical disconnect between business leaders and technologists. Since that time, Mik has been working on creating new tools and a new framework for connecting software value stream networks and enabling the shift from project to product.

Mik is the author of the book Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. Mik lives with his family in Vancouver, Canada, and travels globally, sharing his vision for transforming how software is built.  

Visit Mik’s Website

Peter D. Moore is a business and digital technology strategy advisor specializing in helping companies manage for exponential revenue, margin and net income growth. Over the past 15 years, Mr. Moore has worked with CEO’s, COO’s and other C-Suite executives from Citigroup, Charles Schwab, Johnson & Johnson, Mead Westvaco, Microsoft, Tommy Hilfiger, SAP, SAS Institute and U.S. Trust. 

Over the past five years he has collaborated with his brother Geoffrey Moore to develop new models and tools to enable companies to effectively compete in the new age of digital disruption. He has introduced a new 4 Zone Model to help C-Suite executives and their senior leadership teams maximize the business value of digital technology within their organizations. Client engagements include Amgen, Box, Clorox, FedEx,  ICANN, Intuit, Molina Healthcare, SpaceX, Splunk, UBER and VMware. 

Visit Peter’s Website

• How DevOps and digital disruption will bring in the Age of Software and Data.
• A way to organize your technology portfolio and free its future from the pull of the past
• The about First Ideal, the “lunch factor, and what is required to unleash developer productivity
• About the Second Ideal, flow, and the conditions that allow developers to be orders of magnitude more productive than the competition
• About the Fifth Ideal, core vs. context, and ensuring that context doesn’t starve core 
• About Sarah Moulton, the SVP of Retail Operations, who we must either work with, or compete with

• The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim
• Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption by Geoffrey A. Moore
• Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework by Mik Kersten
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
• Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez
• “Project To Product: Beyond the Turning Point,” presentation by Mik Kersten at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas, 2019
• “How Value Stream Networks Will Transform IT and Business,” presentation by Mik Kersten at DevOps Enterprise Summit London, 2018