Joseph Flahiff

The NEW AGILE MANAGER Joseph Flahiff

Management in the late mid-80's and early 90's was different than it is now. At this time there was a mismatch between leadership style and the goal of the business. The leadership style of rigid optimization of processes for consistent delivery of predictable products, and there was the goal of the business, to be adaptive and innovative. Enter the Agile Movement. The emergence of lightweight development practices, which were the start of the Agile movement. People were just learning what it meant to work with information as a product as opposed to working with an actual object as the product, e.g., a car, a desk or dishwasher. Manufacturing takes one set of management tools and techniques. It takes a whole different set of methods and mental models when you are dealing with information and the creative process that it takes to analyze, design, build, and create in a technology environment. The command and control managers were pushed to the side by coaches like myself. But, in the past 5 years, I have seen a shift. New managers have risen through organizations to positions of leadership. They may not receive explicit training that says, "People need autonomy, that they need engagement, and that they need be interested in the work they are doing to be at their most creative," they have understood it intuitively. However, the approach to agile training has not kept up with this shift. Even I have found myself telling people who were doing the right things already to stop doing them and get out of the way. However, they were not in the way in the first place! Recently telling managers what NOT to do has not sat well with me. Maye this is you. Maybe you have been trained in your career, knowing that command and control do not make sense for the knowledge work, but you do not have a good solid model to work from to move forward. This book is exactly for you! Read on with enthusiasm!