(2022-12-04) Denning Why Agile Needs To Take Over Management Itself

Steve Denning: Why Agile Needs To Take Over Management Itself. Let’s face it. The age of agile has not arrived. The twenty-year effort to persuade large corporations to become Agile enterprises has largely failed. (business agility)

Instead of trying to persuade big firms to embrace Agile, let’s raise our sights. Let’s get clear on what we really need: to take over, and in effect reinvent, the concept of management itself.

Let’s identify the practices of industrial-age management and label them as “obsolete” and show why the constitute a disease that must be eradicated. Then let’s re-imagine the very concept of management itself.

That begins by taking to heart Peter Drucker’s 1954 insight, “There is only one valid purpose of a firm—to create customers.” (Drucker on The Purpose and Objectives of a Business)