The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Get Done
Stephen Denning
AMACOM (February 2018)

How and why “organizations are connecting everyone and everything, everywhere, all the time” and what that means

I cannot recall a prior time when the business world was more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than it is today. In an earlier published book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (2010), Stephen Denning observes, “the problems of today’s workplace are not the personal fault of the individual managers. They are largely the fault of the system they are implementing, which relentlessly constrains the capacity of people to contribute, limits the firm’s productivity, and practically guarantees that clients will be dissatisfied. The mental model of management that these companies are pursuing, with interlocking attitudes and practices, methodically prevents any individual management fix from permanently taking hold.”

Ironically and sadly, this is precisely the situation to which then chairman and CEO of 3M, William L. McKnight responded…86 years ago: “If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.” The same is true of agility, without which no organization can thrive and only a few can survive. I agree with Denning that smart leaders are transforming what their organizations do and how they do it. As I think about all the challenges that organizations — especially the largest organizations — face today, I am again reminded of the fact the largest oil takers need to travel about 40 miles in order to reverse direction. Smaller ships require shorter distances, of course, but all must — in Denning’s words — “radically reinvent how they are organized and led and embrace a new management paradigm, [one that] may seem to some readers to be extreme. It is not. “This isn’t a management fad that was invented last Tuesday and it will be gone by Friday. It is based not just on a handful of recent examples — mere flashes in the pan — but on the experiences over decades of tens of thousands of organizations around the world.” Denning thoroughly explains this “new management paradigm”: what it is, what it isn’t, and how to take full advantage of the benefits it offers.

Denning has decades of wide and deep experience with all types of organizations throughout the global marketplace. In his latest book, he recommends and examines a new management paradigm, one that is a journey, not a destination. He obviously agrees with Richard Dawkins’ widely quoted observation, “Yesterday’s dangerous idea is today’s orthodoxy and tomorrow’s cliché.” As Denning explains, this new paradigm “involves never ending innovation, both in terms of the specific innovations that the organization generates for the customer and the steady improvements to the the practice of management itself. A firm never ‘arrives’ at a steady state where it can relax because ‘we are now Agile.’ Embracing the new paradigm requires continuous improvement and leadership from management.”

These are among the subjects on which Denning focuses that are of greatest interest and value to me:

o How organizations can create more value with less work by minimizing (if not eliminating) waste of resources, especially time
o How small teams can have great imoact
o Why Peter Drucker was right: “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.”
o The power of a flexible “team of teams” with a shared vision
o How Microsoft has “alignment at the top and autonomy at the bottom” remain agile at scale
o How to complete a transition from operational agility to strategic agility
o How to overcome or avoid these traps: shareholder value, share buyback, cost-oriented economies, and backward-looking strategy

Denning is a relentless empiricist and diehard pragmatist who has an insatiable curiosity to understand and then explain the “how” and “why” of major business issues. Fortunately for the rest of us, he is driven to share what he has learned with as many people as possible. In this his latest and most valuable book (thus far), Denning responds to three timeless questions that leaders of all organizations must ask…and then answer:

o “How do organizations flourish in a VUCA world, where the customer is in charge of the marketplace?”
o “Why has embracing tis new way of running organizations become a necessity?”
o “What can leaders at all levels of the society do to create a more energizing, prosperous, and meaningful mode of working and living?”

In this context, I am again reminded of an incident years ago when one of Albert Einstein’s faculty colleagues at Princeton playfully chided him for asking the same questions every year on his final examinations. “Quite true. Guilty as charged. Each year, the answers are different.” That’s why Stephen Denning constantly challenges his own thinking…and ours.