Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy: Survive & Trhive on Disruption: Business Agility with Agile BOSSA nova
About this ebook
Enjoy insights in the book shared by Jez Humble, Diana Larsen, James Shore, Johanna Rothman, and Bjarte Bogsnes. Find out what Spotify, ING, Ericsson, and Walmart say in the book.
Notice, how they emphasize that doing Agile (the mechanics) is different from being Agile (the mindset). The mindset lets you apply flexible Agile patterns not only for software development teams but for the whole company. Many experts are looking into implementing company-wide Agility. Yet, they work from one perspective. For example:
- A Beyond Budgeting expert might say, “Stop fixing the budget annually, because otherwise you won't have the flexibility to react to frequent market changes.”
- An Open Space expert might say, “You need to make space for what you don’t know and can’t control, for totally new things to emerge. If people can follow their passion, you will be able to implement company-wide Agility, otherwise people will just do what they are asked.”
- A Sociocracy expert might say, “You first need to resolve the power structure, because as long as you have a hierarchy defined as top-down you will not become agile.”
- An Agile expert might say, “You need to start inspecting and adapting by using regular retrospectives in order to react flexibly, otherwise you will neither be able to learn from the market nor from within your company.”
All of these perspectives are true, but the perspective is always from within the discipline. Our new perspective synthesizes these approaches and invites you to take a new, overview perspective that can truly address the challenges of doing business in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.
About the author
Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, trainer, author and speaker. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make agile transitions. She is experienced in applying agile processes within medium-sized to large, distributed mission-critical projects and has written about her experiences. She holds a M.A. Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. Product-Engineering, and a B.A. in Education.
She is a member of the Agile Alliance (having served on the board of directors from 2003-2007) and a member of the program committee of many different American, Asian and European conferences, where she has also presented her work.
John Buck is the coauthor of We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, about sociocracy, a sustainable system for organizing and running organizations. In one sense, sociocracy is democracy specially designed for use in organizations. He heads a division of The Sociocracy Group, an international training and consulting organization headquartered in the Netherlands. John has many training workshops and sociocracy implementation projects for a variety of organizations.
John’s research and development is ongoing. For example, he is working with Fujitsu’s advanced software lab to develop Weaver, software that helps meetings go better – in-person, online, and asynchronous.
John Buck has extensive management experience with government and corporations, including managing large information technology projects. John is the first person, not native to the Netherlands, to be certified in the sociocracy circle-organization method. A founding member of The Sociocracy Consulting Group, a division of TSG, an international consulting firm headquartered in Rotterdam, Netherlands, he has introduced sociocracy to a wide range of businesses and organizations, assisting them in designing work and making group decisions effectively by “rewiring” their basic power structure.