"The Age of Agility: Building Learning Agile Leaders and Organizations focuses on learning agility, one of the most important trends in the business world during the past decade. Some surveys have found it was the most frequently used criterion to measure leadership potential. Despite this popularity there are fundamental questions that need to be answered such as (a) What specifically is learning agility? (b) How many facets or dimensions does it have? (c) How do we measure it? and (d) Can it be developed? It appears that much of what is known about the construct of learning agility has been gleaned from its application by practitioners. While this knowledge is an extremely useful place to begin, there is an urgent need to undergird this understanding with science. The purpose of this edited book is to systematically examine the construct through a more scholarly lens. Over 50 authors - both academic researchers and talent management practitioners - have contributed to the contents. The goal is to enhance knowledge of learning agility, distilling and synthesizing scientific evidence with best practices"--

Agile, Lean, and DevOps approaches are radical game changers, providing a fundamentally different way to think about how IT fits into the enterprise, how IT leaders lead, and how IT can harness technology to accomplish the objectives of the enterprise. But honest and open conversations are not taking place between management and Agile delivery teams. In A Seat at the Table, CIO Mark Schwartz explores the role of IT leadership as it is now and opens the door to reveal IT leadership as it should be—an integral part of the value creation engine. With an easy style, Schwartz reveals that the only way to become an Agile IT leader is to be courageous—to throw off the attitude and assumptions that have kept CIOs from taking their rightful seat at the table. CIOs, step on up, your seat at the table is waiting for you.

The biggest lie we were told is that a college education will prepare us for a lifelong career. If you go to college or put in your four years and earn a bachelor's degree, you will find a rewarding and stimulating career with a comfortable salary and benefits. The reality is, there is a huge skill gap between the classroom and the workplace, and this skill gap is the main reason I watched countless friends struggle post-school to find a meaningful career. While we sent out resumes and cleaned up our LinkedIn profiles, an entire generation of college graduates moved back home to live with friends or family because we couldn't afford to pay rent thanks to being, on average, $35,000 in debt to student loan companies. Here's why: We are living in an Age of Agility. The world is changing so quickly, higher education can't keep pace and as a result, we aren't given the tools to prepare us for a sustainable and rewarding career. College graduates are not prepared to enter the workforce. Unlike other pop business books, I'm not selling an empty box of "dream big and work hard." This is a book about defining the path to your dream and working smart. Rather than focusing only on the current state of the industry, this book is about the skills you need to keep pace with the industry as it changes. No matter how the industry shifts, agile skills-skills like social and emotional intelligence, communication, self-management, and creative problem-solving-will always be relevant. Instead of teaching you what to think, this book will teach you how to think. If you like where this is going, flip to Why Read This Book-there's a good chance Age of Agility was written for you.

As the Fourth Industrial Revolution barrels forward and the pace of disruption accelerates, all organizations must operate with agility. But this urgent priority, now widely-accepted by senior leaders, presents a major challenge: In business, government, and warfare, agility is a buzzword. There is no common understanding of what it means, or of what it takes to be consistently agile. In this groundbreaking book, Leo Tilman and Charles Jacoby offer the first comprehensive assessment of the fundamental nature of organizational agility and then describe the essential leadership practices for achieving it. They show that agility is far superior to mere speed or adaptability. Pinpointing its distinctive features, they define agility as the ability to detect and assess changes in the competitive environment in real time and then take decisive action. They demonstrate that agility enables an organization to outmaneuver competitors by seizing opportunities; better defending against threats; and acting as a well-orchestrated collective of teams that are empowered to take disciplined initiative. Combining their personal experience of building and leading agile organizations, Tilman in the realm of business and finance and Jacoby in battlefield command and homeland security, they present a powerful approach to fostering agility up and down an organization, and out to its very edges. They show how to detect opportunities and threats by fighting for risk intelligence; how to pierce through complexity and unleash creativity by nurturing a culture of honesty and trust; how to meld top-down vision and planning with decentralized execution; and how to enhance strategy by recognizing organizations as dynamic portfolios of risk. In a world where leaders and their teams must brave the unknown and step confidently forward – or risk extinction – Agility provides a vital roadmap for seizing the unprecedented possibilities of the new age and dominating change instead of being dominated by it.

Experience is vital for a leader’s success, but merely having an experience (such as a challenging new job, a stretch assignment, or an unexpected hardship) isn’t enough. The best leaders know not just how to seek out developmental experiences, but how to extract the essential lessons within each experience and apply them to future situations. This book will walk you through a four step process for making the most out of your experiences. You will learn how to seek out beneficial experiences, make sense out of both old and new experiences, internalize the most useful lessons from each experience, and apply those lessons to new, unfamiliar, and challenging situations. By becoming learning agile, you’ll be able to use the lessons of experience to meet the challenges headed your way.

"As the leaders of the Work Design Collaborative, authors Charles Grantham and Jim Ware have helped some of the world's top companies become more productive. In Corporate Agility, they share the results of their ground-breaking five-year research project and the forward-thinking strategies that have grown out of this new knowledge. This is the first book to show companies the practical applications for staying competitive in a global economy."--Jacket.

This book is about improving and sustaining agility by focusing on people over process, as the first agile value advocates, and is the third and final book in the author's Lean and Agile Software trilogy. The first – A Tale of Two Systems: Lean and Agile Software Development for Business Leaders – describes what agile is and why we do it. The second – A Tale of Two Transformations: Bringing Lean and Agile Software Development to Life – guides leaders in transforming their organizations to adopt this approach. All three books mix description and elaboration of theory with practical demonstration in fictional companies and projects. This new, third book – People over Process: Leadership for Agility – presents a model of facilitative leadership for agility, which informs the entire book. It begins by describing the roots of the agile movement, which motivates the centrality of people and the need for leadership. The leadership model is then presented, very simply: rigor, alignment, efficiency, through frameworks. Leadership is considered for all team members, and then for the special case of the responsibilities of leaders in formal positions of organizational authority. With this strong background presented, the book proceeds to describe and demonstrate common and highly useful frameworks for agility. The fictional Pacifica Bank is introduced, and we see the Pacifica team work through architecture, project planning, team structure, governance, scrum meeting, and ultimately retrospectives, using frameworks that have been presented. An Appendix summarizes the most useful frameworks for future reference. Throughout the book concepts are illustrated with vignettes from my experience (in the didactic sections) and with the Pacifica fictional case study. The key benefits of the book are to make everyone involved in agile work more effective and fulfilled. Essentially, since agile was first introduced almost two decades ago, the primary focus in practice has been on process. The "scrum" methodology was developed and promulgated, and has been widely adopted. This has been on balance broadly positive, but as an industry we have progressed to the point where following the steps of a methodology, particularly one that seeks to implement concepts where the first value is "People over Process," has reached its limits. The reader of this book: • Gains a powerful, simple model of leadership that enables the "People" in "People over Process;" • Sees these principles in action in a fictional company, making agile leadership understandable and engaging; • Improves their ability to participate in and lead agility; • Learns extraordinarily useful "frameworks" that help in the most important activities in agile software. In short, the reader will be better at delivering valuable software solutions, more valuable to their organizations, and more fulfilled in their work.