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Agile is an approach to management that took off in software development in 2001 as it enabled rapid customer-focused digital development. With Agile's success in accelerating software products and services that customers valued and with the increasing importance of software in general business strategy, business leaders are increasingly turning to Agile for every aspect of their operations. There are already hundreds of thousands of Agile practitioners around the world in all levels of management and in a wide variety of functions.
Agile helps foster innovation in a marketplace that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. The rise of Agile is driven both by the passion of talented employees who love its revolutionary enablement of autonomy, mastery and purpose and by managements that see it as key to dealing with rapidly changing technology and abruptly shifting customer needs. Agile is not only changing the way work is done: leaders find that they too must embrace an Agile mindset for Agile innovators to be effective.
As evidence that Agile has made the transition from software developers' meeting rooms to the executive suite, its strategic importance was recognized in 2016 by the citadel of general management - Harvard Business Review - with its article, "Embracing Agile," by Bain strategists Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland and Hirakata Takeuchi.[2] The centrality of Agile for general management was also recognized in March 2016, by McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm serving many large, long-established corporations, which sponsored a Global Agility Hackathon involving some 1,500 participants worldwide.[3]
As further confirmation, a learning consortium, a group of innovative companies including Microsoft, Ericsson, CH Robinson, Riot Games, Barclays and Cerner was formed to exchange insights from large-scale implementations of Agile goals, principles and values.[4]
But what does it mean for an organization to embrace Agile? To put the question in perspective, there are at least 40 different specific implementations of Agile.[5] My book, The Leader 's Guide to Radical Management , identified more than 70 different Agile practices. How on earth are traditional managers going to make sense of such a bewildering assortment of ideas? Fortunately, when we look closely, we can see that organizations that have embraced Agile practice three core principles:
* The Law of the Small Team
*...