The Age of Agility


Book Description

"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"--




Age of Agility


Book Description

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.




A Seat at the Table


Book Description

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.




Agility


Book Description

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.




Learning Agility


Book Description

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.




Agility


Book Description

Insider secrets to competing-and winning-in the tech-savvy marketplace The new generation of technology savvy workers is changing the way we look at productivity. Agility uniquely describes how technology agility impacts your business's performance and can become a critical success factor. A must-read for leaders defining business strategy and technology implementation, the methodology it describes will show how to measure and drive technology adoption and the derived impact on business results. Includes international cases of various industries, from industry leaders Incorporates the ideas of flexibility, balance, adaptability, and coordination under one umbrella Uniquely describes how technology agility impacts business performance What differentiates Audi, BMW and Mercedes or GM? Understanding it can make or break the future of an organization. Agility makes it clear: the digital divide will be seen in those who take full advantage of the technology versus those merely have it.




Corporate Agility


Book Description

"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.




Continuous Architecture in Practice


Book Description

Update Your Architectural Practices for New Challenges, Environments, and Stakeholder Expectations "I am continuously delighted and inspired by the work of these authors. Their first book laid the groundwork for understanding how to evolve the architecture of a software-intensive system, and this latest one builds on it in some wonderfully actionable ways." --Grady Booch, Chief Scientist for Software Engineering, IBM Research Authors Murat Erder, Pierre Pureur, and Eoin Woods have taken their extensive software architecture experience and applied it to the practical aspects of software architecture in real-world environments. Continuous Architecture in Practice provides hands-on advice for leveraging the continuous architecture approach in real-world environments and illuminates architecture's changing role in the age of Agile, DevOps, and cloud platforms. This guide will help technologists update their architecture practice for new software challenges. As part of the Vaughn Vernon Signature Series, this title was hand-selected for the practical, delivery-oriented knowledge that architects and software engineers can quickly apply. It includes in-depth guidance for addressing today's key quality attributes and cross-cutting concerns such as security, performance, scalability, resilience, data, and emerging technologies. Each key technique is demonstrated through a start-to-finish case study reflecting the authors' deep experience with complex software environments. Key topics include: Creating sustainable, coherent systems that meet functional requirements and the quality attributes stakeholders care about Understanding team-based software architecture and architecture as a "flow of decisions" Understanding crucial issues of data management, integration, and change, and the impact of varied data technologies on architecture Architecting for security, including continuous threat modeling and mitigation Architecting for scalability and resilience, including scaling microservices and serverless environments Using architecture to improve performance in continuous delivery environments Using architecture to apply emerging technologies successfully Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.




Unlocking Agility


Book Description

Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Launching, Sustaining, or Improving Any Agile Enterprise Transformation Initiative As long-time competitive advantages disappear, astute executives and change agents know they must achieve true agile transformation. In Unlocking Agility, Jorgen Hesselberg reveals what works, what doesn’t, and how to overcome the daunting obstacles. Distilling 10+ years of experience leading agile transformation in the enterprise, Hesselberg guides you on jumpstarting change, sustaining momentum, and executing superbly on customer commitments as you move forward. He helps you identify appropriate roles for consultants, optimize organizational structures, set realistic expectations, and measure against them. He shares first-hand accounts from pioneering transformation leaders at firms including Intel, Nokia, Salesforce.com, Spotify, and many more. • Balance building the right thing, the right way, at the right speed • Design a holistic transformation strategy using five dimensions of agility: Technology, Organizational Design, People, Leadership, and Culture • Promote agile skills, knowledge, and abilities throughout your workforce • Incorporate powerful leadership models, including Level 5, Teal, and Beyond Budgeting • Leverage business agility metrics to affect norms and change organizational culture • Establish your Agile Working Group, the engine of agile transformation • Define operating models and strategic roadmaps for unlocking agility, and track your progress You already know agile transformation is essential. Now, discover how to customize your strategy, execute on it in your environment, and achieve it.




Developing Agility and Quickness


Book Description

The ball handler who fakes and then drives past a defender for an easy score. A pass rusher who leaves a would-be blocker in his wake on the way to sacking the quarterback. A setter who manages to maneuver both body and ball in the blink of an eye to make the perfect pass for the kill and match-winning point. These are all reasons agility and quickness are such prized physical attributes in modern sport. Efforts to become markedly quicker or more agile, however, aren’t always successful. Genetic limitations, technical deficiencies, and inferior training activities are among the major obstacles. Developing Agility and Quickness helps athletes blow past those barriers thanks to the top sport conditioning authority in the world, the National Strength and Conditioning Association. NSCA hand-picked its top experts to present the best training advice, drills, and programs for optimizing athletes’ linear and lateral movements. Make Developing Agility and Quickness a key part of your conditioning program, and get a step ahead of the competition.