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As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit , Simone presented a session on Creative Solutions and Energetic Contributions . Watch the video below and read her new blog post which also discusses the importance of collaboration and stakeholder management and how ITIL P...

Following the publication of AXELOS' The Future ITSM Professional report, AXELOS associate Toby Moore joined Dr Tuuli Bell, partner manager at Tasktop Technologies, to discuss the evolution of ITSM businesses and the shift to a more service-based culture. Ever...

A lot of organizations, like the one featured in this animation, experience frustration with their service desk. While that’s not a criticism – the majority get things done quickly – end users get annoyed by the speed of service desk support. Interestingly, what’s usually at...

For those waiting to hear, or wondering, about progress regarding the development of PRINCE2 Agile : please be assured, your wait is nearly over! Having harnessed a highly diverse set of opinions from within the working group, the new best practice guidance, which will blen...

In today’s world of technology, businesses need to understand customers and their role in delivering service and value to them. Tech start-ups get this, with delivery teams focused on giving customers what they need and faster than ever before. But how well are organizations...

Project management learning is influenced increasingly by the importance of engagement . Tenets of engagement such as trust, relationships, communication and collaboration are all part of the behavioural and contextual competencies emerging in project management. Vodafone...

When I first ‘discovered’ ITIL ® in the 1990s, it was both a revelation and like discovering a “family” I never knew I had. At that time, I loved that “family” because of how it took us where we needed to be. And it was needed because IT was largely run by people with ...

The focus of the Project Manager today is more about delivering the right things: we’re now expected to be more involved with senior-level decisions and prove we’re delivering value. In 10 years’ blogging about the project management industry on GirlsGuideToPM.com I’ve ...

According to the Project Management Institute , ineffective communication leads to project failure one third of the time and compromises the project’s budget half the time. I always go by this mantra: people deliver projects not processes and tools . In order to emphasize...

Improving an organization’s agile capability can take many forms: It can involve training people in product-focused frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban, or project-focused frameworks such as PRINCE2 Agile™ and AgilePM/DSDM. Along with this it can include coaching and men...

30 years ago in the manufacturing industry, if you brought out a new product you may have had between three and nine months before your main competitors would catch on and create something to challenge you. Now, in a digitally-led market, you can often count your time of exc...

Recently, I have been lucky enough to attend some excellent events in the IT service management (ITSM) space. I have noticed some reoccurring themes running through the presentations and networking discussions, which was affirmed by the talks I attended at Pink17 . There a...

As more and more people turn to Agile frameworks over traditional project management methodologies to help enhance project capabilities and deliver outputs, it’s important to highlight that Agile is not a panacea for poor project management. At this point, let's distinguish b...

Is Agile IT Service Management (ITSM) an official term and is there a body of knowledge behind it? The simplest answer is not really. I have seen this term several times over the past few years, but never dug into it until I realized that we need more agility in the current...

Now that the dust has settled and the challenge is over, AXELOS Community is proud to announce the winners of The Great Agile Challenge. We’d like to thank everyone that participated in the challenge and we look forward to discussing all things best practice with you in futu...

How agile are we in IT service management (ITSM)? I’ve seen numerous different companies claiming to be agile while – in reality – they’re not. If we refer for a moment to the ITIL Continual Service Improvement (CSI) model, the first step is to define the vision and prop...

I remember the divide in the industry when we published Service Strategy in the summer of 2007. Whilst a minority said it was inspirational, the majority questioned what right IT had in trying to shape business strategy. Zoom forward almost a decade, where the Fourth In...

How can DevOps bring service improvements to IT service management (ITSM) in organizations and avoid throwing operations the “hot potato” of badly planned change projects? And what is the role for ITIL ® Practitioner’s 9 Guiding Principles – in particular start where y...

Approximately 70% of all IT Service Management (ITSM) transformation projects fail according to researchers from Gartner to McKinsey. And among those projects that fail, the same researchers uncovered that about half were unsuccessful because of internal resistance. As the...

By 2019 businesses globally will lose $1.2 trillion* to cyber breaches. This stark fact alone should make any company ensure it is resilient to cyber attack. So where do you start? What does the leadership team need to know and do? What skills are required for organizations...

When quantifying the scale of corporate cyber threat, the figures alone tell a sobering story. As reported in The Economist's recent special report on cyber security, 800m data records were lost last year as a result of cyber-attack, despite estimated worldwide spending of £...

How to develop and grow control processes that work for your teams How do teams deliver better quality software or an IT solution at a pace that matches the needs of a business? This question is especially pertinent in the context of the solution development lifecycle an...

Agile is such a hot topic at the moment with clear recognition that agile approaches are increasingly important to fast-paced, organizational change. It’s definitely up there as important to the future of the project management profession and the people in it. Project...

Working as the service lead for an outsourced IT company, my challenge is understanding what our customers’ businesses are trying to achieve. Customers expect new ideas and innovation based on what we see other companies doing across a host of industries. But, above all, th...

What are the myths and realities about digital disruption? AXELOS attended the recent British Quality Foundation event, Digital Disruption – is it business as usual , and this is a summary of London Business School professor, Julian Birkinshaw’s analysis of current digi...

The ITIL ® Practitioner guiding principles are not independent of each other. You don’t start with focus on value then, once you’ve finished that, start thinking about a different principle. All nine guiding principles work together to help ensure you do the right things...

Configuration management is an area often underestimated by businesses. As the animation shows, creating a configuration management database (CMDB) isn’t necessarily that difficult but actually using it correctly within an organization is. This is because configuration man...

The discipline of project management is evolving rapidly, but what does this mean for the project manager? Lisa Hodges, principal consultant at Cornerstone Service Management, explains why the future belongs to project manager 2.0. At a recent conference one of my fello...

Organizations are going through a period of constant change in how they do things and having to leave behind the mindset of “that’s the way we’ve always done it”. As ITIL ® says, it’s a matter of focusing on customers and what they want. From an IT service management (IT...

Organizations today are struggling to stay responsive and effective in the face of constant change. Most are struggling just to catch up with, let alone get in front of, the accelerating turbulence that seems to infect every industry being impacted by ‘macro disruption’: A te...

In this first blog post, Julia Gosse considers organizations and their staff that have already adopted PRINCE2 ® : What challenges do PRINCE2 practitioners and their employers face with the concept of agile project delivery ? The biggest challenge is that the term “agile...

Why is IT and - consequently ITSM - under pressures that can pull it in two different directions? Leading research company, Gartner, calls it "bimodal IT" and depicts it as “rocks in a river”: solid IT operational excellence standing against the fast-moving flow of digital. ...

If your key stakeholders and end users aren’t happy, nobody’s happy. Key stakeholders can make or break the success of a project, even if all the deliverables are met and the objectives are satisfied . I was thinking recently about what added value I bring to the success ...

AXELOS associate Toby Moore and Dr Tuuli Bell, partner manager at Tasktop Technologies explore the outlook for IT following the release of the AXELOS The Future ITSM Professional report . IT has evolved beyond recognition in recent years to become an integrated part of ...

What you should do to improve project success and achieve value has been high on the agenda this year. Equally, the increased uncertainty in the economy has raised awareness of the need for increased professionalism in project and programme management (PPM) . In short, we’v...

As an organization are you interested in attracting top talent? In growing your business? Providing your employees, the tools they need to be successful? If you are than you need to create a learning-centred work culture. Our re cent ITSM and PPM benchmarking surveys sho...

What can ITSM practitioners learn from getting involved in problem-solving simulation activities? For example, the Apollo 13 simulation – something offered by accredited trainers – replicates the NASA event made famous by the phrase “Houston, we’ve got a problem”. And i...

The scenario animation below shows how a company was able to reduce costs and calls to its service desk by applying the ITIL Practitioner Guiding Principle of Design for Experience. Watch the animation and read the accompanying blog from ITIL Practitioner Architect Team Membe...

What's the point of ongoing professional development? In "My CPD Life", a short series of blog posts to coincide with the launch of the AXELOS Professional Development Programme , experienced practitioners share their views on the value of keeping your skills and kno...

Do you have what it takes to be a Business Relationship Manager (BRM) ? What does a BRM do? The role is responsible for building relationships between the IT organization and the business units to ensure IT services meet the needs of business customers. BRMs collaborate...

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit Hitesh presented a session on ITIL Practitioner and Service Design Roles . Watch the video and read his new blog post discussing the roles that can successfully benefit from adopting ITIL Practitioner. What is ITIL Pract...

The discrepancy between reports and reality is something that I see frequently within organizations because, as the animation below explores, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are often developed without proper consideration and understanding of the reasons behind the measure...

In response to the AXELOS The Future ITSM Professional report, AXELOS associate Toby Moore and Dr Tuuli Bell, partner manager at Tasktop Technologies, explore emerging issues in a key function of IT: The Service Desk An effective Service Desk is key to a successful IT...

What can project managers do to improve their skills and capabilities and – in turn – the performance of project teams? Have a best practice mindset To be truly effective, you need to know your chosen project management method – such as PRINCE2 ® – in ...

Since good governance is about the processes for making and implementing decisions, then effective governance and accountability structures are vital particularly if organizations are to successfully use an agile approach to deliver business change through the investment of p...

This is the first in a series of conversations with Nick Wilding and leading cyber resilience commentators and practitioners from around the world. Who should countries and companies learn from when thinking about cyber resilience? Estonia has been described in tech pub...

People and organizations seek out the reassurance in structured recommendations from sources like ITIL ® . These sources essentially articulate in a cogent and accessible way the learning from others who have been in the same place before them, facing the same challenges...

The worlds of IT and ITSM have been suffering something of a Mark Twain syndrome lately: reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated. Even worse than that, they’ve been subject to unnecessary hype along the lines of “the IT Department is dead, ITIL is dead, DevOps i...

Over the last year and a bit, our team has been lucky to have had the opportunity to meet with and speak to the wonderful ITSM community worldwide to understand how ITIL is being used to deliver value with IT Service Management (ITSM). A lot of this is captured in the AXELOS ...

In ITSM you need the skills to influence people beyond having a process and that’s all about relationships, interaction and successful communication. Human-to-human interaction seems an obvious concept? But how well do people in IT/ITSM perform in this respect? Over the ...

IT Service Management (ITSM) practitioners often forget that service management was not something they invented but rather a concept taken and adapted to create their own view of the world. They borrowed the principles of good customer service used by businesses, put “IT” in...

Developing materials for PRINCE2 Agile is a true milestone in the evolution of PRINCE2®. It’s the first extension to the PRINCE2 core qualification and is based on end user feedback; we’ve listened to practitioners and organizations to understand what they need, which is ulti...

Every service management implementation is a cultural transformation. And culture change is an even bigger issue for senior management than it is for IT and ITSM, as they need to recognize that for such a transformation to be successful, they need to lead and be role mode...

IT organizations don’t tend to recognize when they have an image problem or why they should care. Though some would argue they’re getting better at dealing with it, it’s still not nearly enough. The traditional problem is based on IT organizations believing the world revolv...

PRINCE2 is often taken as synonymous with the term “waterfall”. That’s a mistake with a number of implications. The truth is you can use it in a waterfall way but it’s not intrinsically waterfall; the main idea is to deliver profit and products for your business. Yet prac...

It is only a month since the launch of PRINCE2 Agile and all of the hard work put in over the last year has turned to relief and excitement. A bit like cyclist Chris Froome going up Alpe d’Huez the other day in the Tour de France – it may be hard work during the ascent, ...

Why should IT Service Management (ITSM) professionals care about agile delivery of technology services? With the business world changing rapidly under our feet, being agile allows rapid response to those changes in a timely manner and shifts your organization in the right d...

Why, in project management, are small projects treated as the “poor relation”? Many Project Managers aspire to manage large projects and programmes – large, transformation activities with high visibility, significant resources and a lot of kudos! As such, an aspirational Pr...

Continual service improvement (CSI) is integral to the ITIL® framework and should be fundamental for any IT Service management (ITSM) strategy. After all many of us are constantly looking to innovate, improve our business model, reduce costs, risks and improve the overall v...

A recurring challenge in large organizations is the lack of trust among practitioners, teams and people that are using different methodologies. Many “agilists” use language that non-agile trained people don’t understand which can lead to distrust within a business and in te...

You only have to be a casual follower of the news to see that cyber attacks and the resulting damaging data breaches are happening with greater frequency. TalkTalk and JP Morgan are just two of the latest high profile companies to show their vulnerability to cyber crime....

You’ve done it! You studied hard, you took the exam, and you passed it! You are now a fully-accredited practitioner. But what often happens next is that on your return to work you fail to apply what you’ve learned. There are several possible reasons for this: maybe you took...

A summary of a presentation given to the Digital Leaders Conference on 9 December 2015 Here are two short, true stories: In the spring of 2013 the CEO of a global energy organization was finalizing the details of a significant commercial bid with his board colleagues. On...

Gary Warzala is the former SVP CISO at Visa and has also held senior roles in information security and IT risk management at Aon and GE (General Electric). In 2014, he was a trusted CISO adviser for a major retailer following a serious information security breach. In this...

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit Mauricio presented a session on Main challenges at Service Strategy . Watch the video and read his new blog post also discussing the importance of Service Strategy for IT teams and how ITIL Practitioner provides the tools an...

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit Bjorn presented a session on ITIL Practitioner and Strategic Roles . Watch the video and read his new blog post also discussing how ITIL Practitioner can be applied to a number of key IT Service Management (ITSM) roles. ...

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit Robin presented a session on ITSM Challenges and Training Benefits . Watch the video and read her new blog post also discussing how the right training can help organization meet IT Service Management (ITSM) challenges. ...

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit Barry presented a session on Role Challenges and Training Benefits, which covered the benefits offered by ITIL Practitioner. Watch the video and read his new blog post discussing how the certification and guidance can help ad...

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit Michael presented a session on Small scale ITSM implementation and ITIL Practitioner . Watch the video and read his new blog post also discussing this topic. How do you apply a large, comprehensive framework like ITIL ®...

What do individual people know about using agile delivery methods for projects that organizations don’t? According to AXELOS’ 2016 PRINCE2 ® Report , individuals are embracing agile methods more than organizations: 81% in a sample of 2,400 see the value of working in an ag...

When I analyze the tangible results my organization has achieved as a result of employees being ITIL ® competent, the return is undeniable. The benefits of ITIL training are threefold: differentiation, service improvement and cost saving. Differentiation In 2012, lev...

Focus on value is one of the nine guiding principles described in the ITIL ® Practitioner Guidance and is the subject of the animated video below. Of course it’s so obvious that we should focus on value that you might wonder whether it needs saying at all. The...

What is the current state of project management and Project Managers? At the turn of 2016, PM Perspectives Blog - in its top 10 project management trends post - said: “Project management is no longer boxed away in a corner of the room. It stands front and centre and is b...

Why is the ITIL Practitioner Guiding Principle, Be Transparent, so important to get right? In the scenario dramatized by the animation below, a lack of updates about incident resolution creates complaints and an image of a service desk “black hole”. How does this happe...

One of the reasons why businesses overcomplicate processes in transition projects is because they are trying to develop an approach that meets all the principles of best practice. Quite often, the people in charge or accountable for transition projects want to achieve perfec...

Tallinn was mild and drizzly when I arrived as a first-time visitor to the annual itSMF Estonia conference , which is now in its eleventh year. Estonia has a thriving IT Service Management (ITSM) community, and the weather didn't dampen the enthusiasm of the 150 attendees, w...

How can organizations and their programme managers ensure agile approaches and programme management work well together in 2017? This is a hot topic right now, with a rapidly-evolving technology landscape which lends itself to agile techniques and the pressure on organizatio...

It’s a natural response for many IT organizations to think about how implementing tools can be the solution to IT problems. But it’s a big problem, as there’s no magic pixie dust sprinkled over a tool and it can affect people negatively as much as positively. This issue ...

AXELOS’ Future ITSM Professional report predicts a growing need for people working in ITSM to adopt a more strategic role as service management principles spread beyond IT and throughout organizations. Service management consultant, Lisa Hodges, reflects on the findings: ...

Hitesh Patel demystifies the role and qualities of the Service Delivery Manager and where ITIL® Practitioner’s best practice guidance can support their work: Service Delivery Manager (SDM) is a role many people struggle with within IT Service Management (ITSM) and, for...

Project manager, Ana Bertacchini, examines the importance of emotional intelligence for project managers and how best practice methods such as PRINCE2 ® can help. Emotional intelligence is about managing and understanding emotions – both your own and others’. Unlike t...

Ten years ago, IT in India was a very different world to now: the country was the “back office” of the world, providing outsourced services in the form of Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) and Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO). During this period ITIL ® was the...

The quick-to-market digital environment of today means organizations have to find a way to incorporate agile working in what they do. Take-up of agile remains a mixed bag and we should acknowledge that agile isn’t for everyone or everything. However, where the feeling t...

In Agile, Minimum Viable Bureaucracy (MVB) refers to a way of having just enough process to make things work, but not so much as to make it cumbersome particularly when applied to portfolio, programme and project direction, management and delivery practices. It’s about findin...

Traditionally, ITSM has not been agile. People have tended to focus more on having robust processes and rather than considering “what do we need?”, they have asked “what more can we put in to processes ?”. This level of “over-control” has happened because of over-enginee...

Many small companies and even departments in larger enterprises simply don’t have the need for a dedicated project manager and, more often than not, will appoint someone from within the business to run projects on a case-by-case basis. Selection is usually made on the gro...

Hi everyone, thanks for listening to first audio interview brought to you by the ITIL ® team. We hope you enjoy it. Listen to the interview We’re getting off to a flying start with two stellar interviewees: Gene Kim (IT Revolution Press, co-author of The Phoenix Pr...

At an IT Service Management (ITSM) conference in 2016, the following equation caught my eye: “DevOps = Agile + Lean + ITSM”. In other words, DevOps is about good development practices continually delivering product features (Agile), effectively and with minimal wasted effort...

Selling the enterprise-wide benefits of ITIL and Programme and Project Management (PPM) to businesses and other complex organizations should be the daily bread for anyone making a living in global best practice training. Selling the enterprise-wide benefits of ITIL and Progr...

The space in between people managing and operating IT services and those that build and deliver IT products could be called the great divide. Among developers, the thinking can - sometimes - be based on the principles of "build it and hand it over". The big issue is that the...

There are, as you may know, a few key differences between agile and traditional waterfall projects, when managed using PRINCE2® . Traditional waterfall projects are delivered sequentially, whereas agile projects tend to be iterative and incremental. Traditional project p...

IT professionals do not typically focus on delivering value to customers and that’s because service providers in general don’t understand what value is – it’s not quantifiable, it’s not tangible, it’s not definable, it’s not measureable and so it can frighten them. Manageme...

ITIL is being challenged by ‘shiny new’ philosophies, methodologies and frameworks that have recently laid claim to the work practices of service management professionals. But how valid and viable are these new approaches and how do they relate to the ITIL ® framework ...

Project management and transformation practitioners Stephen Dowling and Stephen Callaghan have been sharing their 'Adapt or Die!' ideas with organizational change practitioners in Australia. AXELOS caught up with them to find out what this means for projects and project man...

Can you be both agile and strategic in project management? Based on our recent research, The Future Project Manager , AXELOS invited consultant trainers Duncan Wade and David Hinde to explore the debate in this first part of a two-part blog post series: Project managers...

Today’s increase in cyber-attacks – and the resulting loss of valuable data and denial of services they cause – means organizations and individuals need to be better prepared to tackle this threat. What we all need is greater cyber resilience. AXELOS is partnering with Di...

As some of you may know, this week I’m attending the Agile Alliance conference, Agile 2018 in San Diego. The event run by the Scrum Alliance brings together many of the leading thinkers on everything agile for a whole week of talks, discussions and much more. For my part, I...

PRINCE2 Agile ® arguably offers the best of both worlds, so why aren’t more Agile practitioners embracing this collaborative approach?  In the past five years or so, I’ve seen a growing recognition within the Agile community that controls, governance and oversight are...

Delivering the right thing, in the right way and at the right time to ensure maximum return on investment isn’t easy. However, by ‘adjusting the controls’ within the principles and themes of PRINCE2® we have found a more responsive, agile, way of working that’s delivering si...

Make no mistake about it - blending PRINCE2® and agile is a big deal. And as we approach the threshold of a PRINCE2 and agile marriage, it's clear to see that we've come a long way since 2007 when I first questioned how the two could feasibly come together. Back then, when...

There are two areas of culture we need to look at. The first is an understanding of the role of ITSM and the need to challenge the business perception that looks upon the Information Technology department or division in an organization as a separate entity rather than an inte...

Many organizations either don’t understand or avoid organizational change management (OCM), choosing rather to focus on the technical elements of change. Of course, this ignores that the human factor could be integral to failure of a change programme. Today’s self-service t...

At first glance you might not think AXELOS’ latest best practice certifications – PRINCE2 Agile ® , RESILIA ™ and ITIL ® Practitioner – have very much in common. However, there is a shared thread running through each that can have a real impact on organizational...

Project teams are increasingly becoming virtual in one form or another. This can include working across different geographies, time zones, firm-wide boundaries and with third parties. Projects can cover a number of different countries with virtual teams and as Project Manag...

Louise John shares her thoughts on why ITIL doesn’t require lots of people and how businesses of all shapes and sizes can use the framework effectively. Does ITIL require a lot of people to work effectively and do you need to have one individual for every role, process ...

While security threats are constantly evolving and becoming more sophisticated our industry’s approach to cyber safety has - in the main - not developed at the same rate. Frequently, businesses have a ‘set it and forget it’ approach, tackling cyber security when an employee...

The use of managed service providers is relatively common across all sorts of organizations. Unfortunately, what’s also common is ineffective relationships and ways of working between businesses and their provider. Most organizations work with a managed service provider in ...

ITIL ® can help companies improve effectiveness, efficiency and cost effectiveness by developing reliable data and consistent delivery, processes and tools. But when it comes to demonstrating the difference ITIL is making, and especially when the interpretation of valu...

In this second of a two-part blog post series based on AXELOS’ recent research, The Future Project Manager , consultant trainers Duncan Wade and David Hinde explore agile in project management and how it aligns with a strategic approach: While the term “agile” is becom...

To take Bill Clinton strategist James Carville’s famous quotation and apply it to the world of project management: “It’s the benefits and value, stupid!” But as Dr. Harold Kerzner of IIL revealed in a recent AXELOS webinar , 70% of companies fail to achieve the bene...

The ITIL ® update recently announced by AXELOS will be guided by the Lead Architect Team, comprising highly-respected experts from around the world. In this first blog post from the team, Troy DuMoulin talks IT past and present along with what an updated ITIL will mean f...

In the world of project management , what do we mean by complex? Managing the refurbishment of historic buildings and public institutions in a densely populated city is one such complex and challenging environment. These busy facilities often need to stay open while work ...

A well-designed project and stage plan was once the pride of any successful project manager. In the post-waterfall era of agile everything, the humble project and stage plan has got itself a bit of a bad reputation for being excessive. However, effective project management st...

If you want to successfully deliver new products and services to keep your organization competitive in today’s changing world, effective project management is critical. The project management method, PRINCE2 ® , has been taken up by more than 150 countries and, by its prov...

This year AXELOS launched the AXELOS Consulting Partner Programme . The programme allows consulting organizations to enter into an official partnership with AXELOS for the first time. The programme is part of our continuing commitment to ensure all organizations that use our...

This is the second in a series of conversations between Nick Wilding and leading cyber resilience commentators and practitioners from around the world and also Nick's second discussion with Karoliina Ainge, head of Estonian cyber security policy. In 2015 AXELOS launched i...

Q: When is an iceberg not just a large block of ice that can sink ships? A: When it’s the hidden iceberg of attitude, behaviour and culture that stops an organization getting the full benefit from implementing ITIL ® . For example, a large European bank had adopted ...

For many years, I’ve felt that I’ve been the official ITIL ® apologist in the DevOps community, because I’ve always believed that DevOps and ITIL should be able to peacefully coexist. But these days, I feel that a more activist role in the DevOps community is necessary -...

How true to life are the so-called projects being managed by the so-called Project Manager on The Apprentice? What problems do they encounter and how do they deal with them? How should they be dealt with and how would the PRINCE2 Agile ® guidance handle things? The seri...

The value of programme and project assurance can be described as the process of checking that a programme or project makes the right commitments to the business and then delivers on those commitments. Assurance provides an  independent, confidential, objective view  of progra...

In the international bestseller The 7 habits of highly effective people (Free Press, 1988), Steven R. Covey describes an approach to being effective in attaining goals by aligning oneself to what he calls the ‘true north’ principles of a character ethic that are universal...