The Age of Agile

The Age of Agile, How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done, by Stephen Denning, AMACOM 2018

The Age of Agile is a scary business book whose author debunks a pile of "management truths," including:

1. standard, hierarchical mindsets and models are fast or flexible enough.  In fact hierarchies are built for control, not to follow customer changing demand.  Nor are hierarchies built to elicit input from quiet but insightful members of the organization.

2.  Innovation is not just about new software media or new products.  Rather, innovation is a journey whose milestones can create new management structures and profiles.  Don't expect innovation to continue to simply crank out new products - look for foundational culture changes to keep the new ideas flowing.

3.  A company can drown, quickly, in digital data.  But a company that controls and manages the data has a shot at optimizing systems and analytics.  We are all seeing operations that have drowned when the floodgates of data and analytics opened.  Even as early as the McNamara "Whiz Kids" pioneering data creation days, we knew that the numbers could tell a story, but they weren't everything.

4.  As long as robots do not reproduce themselves, humans, and their ability to think strategically, will be needed to manage the bits and byte of data creation.  That means that wall-in IT departments are doomed; ordinary workers and personnel will become the data decision-makers.

Drawing on examples taken from Apple, Lyft, Tesla and Airbnb, Denning illustrates how smartness - data, robots, extreme speed - can enable killer competition.  As for Tesla, the jury is not in yet - The Mill Girl is convinced that Musk doesn't really want to be president of a company that actually manufactures cars - marketing is his game, and I would bet my allowance that as soon as he finds the right candidate, he will fold Tesla into the arms of a bigger, heavy-duty real manufacturer.  Otherwise, why would he have centered manufacturing for his brandy-new, innovative electric car company in the old NUMMI, General Motors/Toyota plant, which in itself was a ploy for both parties?  Why would he chose above all odds, but in full furtherance of government subsidies, to locate a new critical plant in that area when Ohio, Indiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and even Detroit, offered thousands of trained and ready workers?  

Denning highlights how Spotify and Barclays Bank, Etsy, and the US Army have embarked at varying speeds on this agility journey.  The Age of Agile makes a compelling case against centralized, top-down control, instead drawing out the brains and smarts of people at all levels of the organization.  It's a bold foray into team-focused operations fueled by just the right amount and depth of critical data.  We're in the midst of this transformation, finding ourselves in that unique time when the landscape is shifting, and old languages read like Esperanto - nice idea, might work out eventually, but impossible to comprehend in their entirety at this point.  It's coming, it's coming.  

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, pemoody@aol.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, tricia@patriciaemoody.com,