An unstoppable business revolution is under way, and it is Agile. Sparking dramatic improvements in quality, innovation, and speed-to-market, the Agile movement has helped companies learn to connect everyone and everything…all the time. With rapidly evolving consumer needs and technology that is being updated quicker than ever before, businesses are recognizing how essential it is to adapt quickly. The Agile movement enables a team, unit, or enterprise to nimbly acclimate and upgrade products and services to meet these constantly changing needs. Filled with examples from every sector, The Age of Agile helps you: Master the three laws of Agile Management (team, customer, network) Embrace the new mindset Overcome constraints Employ meaningful metrics Make the entire organization Agile Companies don’t need to be born Agile. With the groundbreaking formulas laid out in The Age of Agile, even global giants can learn to act entrepreneurially. Your company’s future may depend on it!
Filled with examples from every business sector, The Age of Agile helps leaders of businesses both large and small learn to act entrepreneurially. It enables an enterprise to nimbly adapt and upgrade products and services to meet rapidly changing technology and customer needs.
"The Age of Agility: Building Learning Agile Leaders and Organizations focuses on learning agility, one of the most important trends in the business world during the past decade. Some surveys have found it was the most frequently used criterion to measure leadership potential. Despite this popularity there are fundamental questions that need to be answered such as (a) What specifically is learning agility? (b) How many facets or dimensions does it have? (c) How do we measure it? and (d) Can it be developed? It appears that much of what is known about the construct of learning agility has been gleaned from its application by practitioners. While this knowledge is an extremely useful place to begin, there is an urgent need to undergird this understanding with science. The purpose of this edited book is to systematically examine the construct through a more scholarly lens. Over 50 authors - both academic researchers and talent management practitioners - have contributed to the contents. The goal is to enhance knowledge of learning agility, distilling and synthesizing scientific evidence with best practices"--
A guide to the adhocracy form of business management and how it can foster a company’s success. The leading companies of the past twenty years have all harnessed the power of information to gain competitive advantage. But as access to big data becomes ubiquitous, it can no longer guarantee a leg up. Fast/Forward makes the case that we are entering a new era in which firms that understand the limits of 1s and 0s will take the lead. Whereas the industrial age saw the rise of bureaucracy, and the information age has been described as a meritocracy, we are witnessing the rise of adhocracy. In uncertain, rapidly-changing times, adhocracic organizations scan the horizon for winning opportunities. Then, instead of questing after more analysis, they respond with agility by making smart, intuitive decisions. Combining decisive action with emotional conviction, future-facing firms seize the day. Fast/Forward paints the big picture of a new approach to strategy and provides the necessary playbook to make your company fit for the future. Praise for Fast/Forward “Fast/Forward makes a compelling case for spontaneity, speed, and a willingness to lead with intuition. More importantly, it speaks to the leadership qualities required to implement its suggestions—providing practical ways to cultivate to those qualities.” —Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford University, author of Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t “[Birkinshaw and Ridderstråle] are on the right track: In an ever-faster, globalized world, companies not only need a compelling strategy, but also an adaptive and caring performance culture. To unleash their full ingenuity, we have to empower our colleagues to act like owners.” —Joe Kaeser, President and CEO, Siemens AG “Big data is oversold as the most important facet of competitive advantage. Rather, breakthrough leaps of faith are necessary to achieve extraordinary results. Fast-Forward is full of practical advice about how to capitalize on this simple idea in order to forge your corporate future.” —Anita McGahan, Rotman School of Management, author of How Industries Evolve
Agile, Lean, and DevOps approaches are radical game changers, providing a fundamentally different way to think about how IT fits into the enterprise, how IT leaders lead, and how IT can harness technology to accomplish the objectives of the enterprise. But honest and open conversations are not taking place between management and Agile delivery teams. In A Seat at the Table, CIO Mark Schwartz explores the role of IT leadership as it is now and opens the door to reveal IT leadership as it should be—an integral part of the value creation engine. With an easy style, Schwartz reveals that the only way to become an Agile IT leader is to be courageous—to throw off the attitude and assumptions that have kept CIOs from taking their rightful seat at the table. CIOs, step on up, your seat at the table is waiting for you.
The Flow System is a holistic FLOW based approach to delivering Customer 1st Value. It is built on a foundation of the Toyota Production System (TPS/LEAN) and the new Triple Helix of Flow creating the DNA of Organizations. The Flow System enables business growth through eliminating non-value-added activities, fostering an environment for innovation, enabling the rapid delivery of value, and shortening the time to market. The Flow System provides a re-imagined system for organizations to understand complex problems, embrace distributed leadership, and build high performing teams. The Triple Helix of Flow relates to the interconnected nature of the three helixes: Complexity Thinking Helix - A new form of thinking to aid the understanding of uncertainty and complex adaptive systems. Distributed Leadership Helix - An emergent hybrid leadership model that is capable of making bold and disruptive moves across an industry. Team Science Helix - A multidisciplinary field that studies all things related to teams and small groups in the workplace. The Triple Helix identified the interactions between and among agents (people, machines, events...) that emerge into new patterns, networks, and knowledge to advance an organization's ability to be more innovative, adaptive, resilient, and agile when operating in complex environments. Endorsements: "The Flow System shows how to generate and nurture self-organizing teams that mobilize the full talents of those doing the work to cope with dizzying change and complexity, while also drawing on the contributions of those for whom the work is being done-the customers."-Steve Denning, author of The Age of Agile "Organizations that pull off this triple helix trick of thinking about the complexity of their systems and the environment in which they're operating, distributed leadership to engage the collective intelligence and creativity of the organization, and building teams of teams so the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, have a good chance of keeping up and staying ahead."-Steve Spear, MIT Sloan School senior lecturer, author of The High-Velocity Edge "The Flow System's Triple Helix provides many of the tools and ways of thinking we will need to do that; it is agile without being doctrinaire about Agile."- David Snowden, creator of the Cynefin Framework, Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge.
Game-changing disruptions will likely unfold on your watch. Be ready. In Dual Transformation, Scott Anthony, Clark Gilbert, and Mark Johnson propose a practical and sustainable approach to one of the greatest challenges facing leaders today: transforming your business in the face of imminent disruption. Dual Transformation shows you how your company can come out of a market shift stronger and more profitable, because the threat of disruption is also the greatest opportunity a leadership team will ever face. Disruptive change opens a window of opportunity to create massive new markets. It is the moment when a market also-ran can become a market leader. It is the moment when business legacies are created. That moment starts with the core dual transformation framework: Transformation A: Repositioning today’s business to maximize its resilience, such as how Adobe boldly shifted from selling packaged software to providing software as a service. Transformation B: Creating a new growth engine, such as how Amazon became the world’s largest provider of cloud computing services. Capabilities link: Fighting unfairly by taking advantage of difficult-to-replicate assets without succumbing to the “sucking sound of the core.” Anthony, Gilbert, and Johnson also address the characteristics leaders must embrace: courage, clarity, curiosity, and conviction. Without them, dual transformation efforts can founder. Building on lessons from diverse companies, such as Adobe, Manila Water, and Netflix, and a case study from Gilbert’s firsthand experience transforming his own media and publishing company, Dual Transformation will guide executives through the journey of creating the next version of themselves, allowing them to own the future rather than be disrupted by it.
“We need better approaches to understanding and managing software requirements, and Dean provides them in this book. He draws ideas from three very useful intellectual pools: classical management practices, Agile methods, and lean product development. By combining the strengths of these three approaches, he has produced something that works better than any one in isolation.” –From the Foreword by Don Reinertsen, President of Reinertsen & Associates; author of Managing the Design Factory; and leading expert on rapid product development Effective requirements discovery and analysis is a critical best practice for serious application development. Until now, however, requirements and Agile methods have rarely coexisted peacefully. For many enterprises considering Agile approaches, the absence of effective and scalable Agile requirements processes has been a showstopper for Agile adoption. In Agile Software Requirements, Dean Leffingwell shows exactly how to create effective requirements in Agile environments. Part I presents the “big picture” of Agile requirements in the enterprise, and describes an overall process model for Agile requirements at the project team, program, and portfolio levels Part II describes a simple and lightweight, yet comprehensive model that Agile project teams can use to manage requirements Part III shows how to develop Agile requirements for complex systems that require the cooperation of multiple teams Part IV guides enterprises in developing Agile requirements for ever-larger “systems of systems,” application suites, and product portfolios This book will help you leverage the benefits of Agile without sacrificing the value of effective requirements discovery and analysis. You’ll find proven solutions you can apply right now–whether you’re a software developer or tester, executive, project/program manager, architect, or team leader.
