Doing Agile Right

Darrell Rigby is a partner in Bain & Company's Boston office, where he leads the Global Innovation practice. He has appeared on CNBC, CNN's Moneyline, and Bloomberg as a frequent 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 global head of the firm's Operating Model practice and a partner in Bain's Chicago office. Steve Berez is a founding member of Bain's Enterprise Technology practice and a partner in the firm's Boston office.

For decades, business leaders have been painfully aware of a huge gap: they aspire to build agile, adaptable organizations. Their daily reality, however, is one of silos, sluggish processes, and stalled innovation. Agile is now hailed as the necessary bridge across this chasm, with the potential to transform a company and catapult it to the front of the pack.

Not so quickly. Bain & Company thought leader Darrell Rigby and his colleagues Sarah Elk and Steve Berez provide a much-needed reality check in this clear-eyed, indispensable book. They dispel the myths and misconceptions that have accompanied agile's rise to prominence, such as the notion that it can completely reshape an organization, or that it should be used in every function and for all types of work. They demonstrate that agile teams can be extremely effective at improving people's jobs and accelerating innovation, but only if the method is fully understood and implemented correctly.

Balance, they argue, is the key. Every organization must optimize and tight control some of its operations while also innovating. When done correctly, agile allows for rapid innovation without sacrificing the efficiency and dependability required for traditional operations. The authors explain how agile actually works, what not to do, and the critical importance of properly scaling agile in order to reap its full benefits. They then lay out a strategy for guiding the enterprise's transition to a truly agile state.

Agile is not an end in itself; rather, it is a means to an end of becoming a high-performance operation. Doing Agile Right is a must-read for any company attempting to make the transition—or maintain high agility.

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 621 reviews)

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