Starter list for now; additional ideas, thoughts, wishes more than welcome:
- Life as a river
- “Point positive” — lead by doing, and negative reinforcement is just that
- The leader’s obligation to their people
- Service operations as the ultimate source of customer and product intelligence
- The triple constraints (time, money, how much fun you wanna have) — as important as ever, but not that easy
- Fly fishing lessons applied to high stakes projects under volatile conditions
- The Lifeboat Exercise, in reverse (mgmt concerns for a killer team: capability, chemistry, longevity)
- Execview’s “Business Lifecycle Excellence”… good concept, but is it easy enough?
- 8th grade campers and self-organizing teams
Once in a while you get shown the light... 
Joe —
Have you looked at any of the Agile/Scrum stuff? I am not a big fan of methodologies in general, but I have to say the general ideas they espouse seem just about right for projects of just about any size: find the smallest possible team that has all the power to decide, force senior management to empower the team to decide, meet daily, define and deliver smallest possible chunks, iterate, avoid specialization, etc.
I want to learn more, but I have seen some cases where these kinds of strategies have helped an otherwise defective organization operate at light speed.
Great subject, and no shortage of opinions to be found just about everywhere. I would hardly call myself an expert, but I first tried Scrum in 1997 (yes, even before Agile became the buzzword) to so-so effect. No direct, daily involvement of the “product mgr” or customer advocate. I believe in the Agile approach for lots of problems, particularly where the requirements are NOT clear or ARE likely to evolve with discovery… basically, almost any new or innovative product or service. But I think “lightning speed” shouldn’t really be the goal; at best it will be a nice byproduct of the real advantages: the ability to rapidly adapt to changing (or better understood) requirements, and a better quality product starting to manifest early by applying some of prescribed techniques: a close-knit team including product owner who reviews work daily, emphasis on continual build and test and frequent delivery of working software, and very little if any outside distraction. Ultimately, I think it allows you to “fail fast and fail well”, so you can deliver better product earlier, and by delivering small chunks frequently, the perception of speed — and presumably quality — will follow.