Doing Agile Right

Many organizations want to become nimble and adaptable, yet everyday life inside them often means departments working in isolation, decisions crawling through layers of approval, and promising ideas losing momentum. Agile is frequently presented as the way out of that bind. Darrell Rigby, a Bain & Company expert, and his colleagues Sarah Elk and Steve Berez contend that the method delivers these benefits only when it is applied correctly. They take aim at popular assumptions, such as the belief that a whole company can be transformed in one stroke or that every function and every type of work should adopt it.

The authors show that agile teams can make jobs more rewarding and speed up innovation, but only when the method is thoroughly understood and carried out properly. Central to their argument is balance. Companies still need to run some operations with tight control and efficiency while also pursuing experimentation. Done well, agile allows vigorous innovation without giving up the reliability that traditional operations depend on.

The book explains how agile works in practice, identifies common missteps, and describes why scaling it properly is essential to gaining its full value. It also offers guidance for executives leading the shift toward an agile enterprise. Throughout, the authors treat agility as a means to high performance rather than an end in itself. The book is aimed at any company making this transition or working to sustain a high level of agility.