The Age of Agile Quotes

“Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“small batches of work, small teams, short cycles, and quick feedback—in effect, “small everything.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“We found in surveys of Agile teams that some 80 percent to 90 percent of Agile teams perceive tension between the way the Agile team is run and the way the whole organization is run. In half of those cases, the tension was “serious.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“Agile management is about working smarter rather than harder. It’s not about doing more work in less time: It’s about generating more value from less work.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“The premise of Agile management is that empowering bottom-up innovation will steadily add significant value for customers and the firm.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile

“The task of delighting customers is thus the job of everyone. It requires the efforts of everyone in the corporation—and beyond—to share insights and figure out ways to handle a challenge that is much more difficult than merely delivering a product or service.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“If you are thinking about Agile as a set of tools and processes, you’re looking for the wrong thing. You can’t go to the store and “buy some Agile management.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“In the Agile organization, “customer focus” means something very different. In firms that have embraced Agile, everyone is passionately obsessed with delivering more value to customers. Everyone in the organization has a clear line of sight to the ultimate customer and can see how their work is adding value to that customer—or not. If their work isn’t adding value to any customer or user, then an immediate question arises as to why the work is being done at all.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“One reason that it’s difficult to understand is that twentieth-century managers had learned to parrot phrases like “The customer is number one!” while continuing to run the organization as an internally focused, top-down bureaucracy interested in delivering value to shareholders.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“The client gets to see the next iteration of the system every three weeks, instead of waiting five years for one “big bang” delivery.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“In other words, firms don’t have to be “born Agile,” like Spotify. Even big, old firms can undertake an Agile transformation if they set their minds and hearts to it—and stick with it.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“Many firms fail to see that since generally all organizations have access to the same rapidly evolving technology, competitive advantage flows not from the technology itself but rather from the agility with which organizations understand and adapt the technology to meet customers’ real needs.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“You visit these big companies. You walk in the front door and it looks like the Taj Mahal. You are expecting wonders, but you start talking to people and you find that it’s just an ordinary place with dispirited staff. They aren’t pursuing big ideas and, even if they are, there’s no mechanism for developing them.” He adds, “I often walk out of these companies depressed about the waste of the human talent working there. These companies must become profoundly more productive if they are to survive in our competitive global economy.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“I asked Carlson what he did in those early years to get people’s buy-in. Carlson says he included everyone but he worked mainly with the early adopters. “You never get a 100 percent,” he says. “We focused on the people who wanted to work this way. You can’t convert everyone on day one. That takes years.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

“People are generally proud of their culture,” he says. “So if you go into an organization and talk about changing the culture, it makes people wonder: ‘What is he talking about? What’s wrong with my culture?’ You don’t want people worrying about this. I never once used the word ‘culture’ at SRI in any of my discussions with the staff. What I talked about was what we needed to do. I had a couple of big themes. And I repeated those themes all the time. I never used the words, ‘culture change,’” he says.”
― Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done