Mike Russell’s four decades of experience ranges from C-level executive personally leading organizations of over 1,000 people and managing budgets above $100 million, Board leader, trusted advisor to CEOs and other leaders from start-ups to global top 20 companies, and a military officer. Based on his extensive experience, he has included business agility, transformation principles, and a roadmap for action in his book Wrong Until Right – How to Succeed Despite Relentless Change.

Along the way, Mike has helped clients succeed. He significantly improved organizational performance, including:

• Assisted several companies created in the 19th century to successfully adapt for the 21st century.
• USAA teams delivering software for USAA’s 12,000+ member service representatives radically improved quality and cut release 3-month defect triage to effectively zero.
• Originated and co-administered a new process to integrate worldwide operations changes after 3 entities merged into 16,000-person units.
• Digitally transformed U.S. airline industry payment settlements of $80 billion annually and one trillion data items, reducing customer costs 40%, speeding cash flow from two weeks to one day, and virtually eliminating fraud.
• Redefined the way the U.S. decided and managed changes to worldwide attack warning, assessment, and Presidential notification.
• Assisted Kuwait in getting financial reparations after the first Gulf War, guiding planning and project operations of organization reporting to the Emir.
• Represented the U.S. as a delegate – at the age of 24 – in talks with the Soviet Union and other nations, deploying a space system saving over 52,000 lives.
• Unleashed people’s potential and increased their satisfaction and joy, multiple times turning hiring/retention ratio from net loss over to net gain.

Additional contributions include co-authoring the leading industry reference AAMI TIR45: 2012 – Technical Information Report – Guidance on the use of AGILE practices in the development of medical device software; speaking worldwide, including for GE to address transformation, culture change, and agile at their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd annual company-wide agile transformation conferences; pioneering for two decades culture’s criticality to achieving agility; being a Lean Startup Week mentor; and delivering the Corporate Executive Board IT Leadership Exchange’s first agile webinar.