Doing Agile Right
Darrell Rigby is a partner in Bain & Company's Boston office, where he manages the Global Innovation practice. He has appeared on CNBC, CNN's Moneyline, and Bloomberg as a regular speaker and writer on innovation, agile, and retail. His work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, the Financial Times, and other journals. Sarah Elk is the worldwide head of the firm's Operating Model division and a partner in Bain's Chicago office. Steve Berez is a founding member of Bain's Enterprise Technology division and a partner in the firm's Boston office.
For decades, corporate executives have been acutely aware of a huge gap: they aim to build agile, adaptable organizations. Their daily reality, however, is one of silos, sluggish processes, and stymied innovation. Agile is now lauded as the necessary bridge across this divide, having the capacity to change a firm and catapult it to the front of the pack.
Not so quickly. Bain & Company thought leader Darrell Rigby and his associates Sarah Elk and Steve Berez give a much-needed reality check in this clear-eyed, important book- Doing Agile Right. They refute the myths and fallacies that have followed agile's rise to prominence, such as the notion that it can completely change an organization, or that it should be applied in every function and for all forms of work. They demonstrate that agile teams can be extremely effective in improving people's work and accelerating innovation, but only if the concept is thoroughly understood and implemented correctly.
Balance, they think, is the key. Every firm must optimize and tight control certain of its operations while also innovating. When done correctly, agile allows for rapid innovation without sacrificing the efficiency and dependability required for traditional processes. The authors explain how agile actually works, what not to do, and the critical need of correctly scaling agile in order to reap its full benefits. They then outline a strategy for guiding the transition to a fully agile enterprise.
Agile is not an end in itself; rather, it is a means to an end of becoming a high-performance organization. Doing Agile Right is a must-read for any firm attempting to make the transition—or maintain high agility. It is exactly one of the best books on change management.
Author: Darrell Rigby, Sarah Elk and Steve Berez
Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Agile-Right-Transformation-Without/dp/163369870X/
Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 556 reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #46,433 in Books
#28 in Business Structural Adjustment
#35 in Organizational Change (Books)
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