Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy: Survive & Thrive on Disruption

by Jutta Eckstein

Today companies are expected to be flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change, which basically asks them to be Agile. Lack of an overarching theory about how to expand the Agile Manifesto has led to many fragmented attempts to apply Agile company-wide.




Enjoy insights in the book shared by Jez Humble, Diana Larsen, James Shore, Johanna Rothman, and Bjarte Bogsnes. Find out what Spotify, ING, Ericsson, and Walmart say in the book.




Quotes from early readers:




"[This is] a very important book. My hopes are that it will be the missing link between agile for teams and the flexible, adaptive and humane organisations we want to build. It’s a great book. Thanks for writing it!" ~Sandy Mamoli, author of Creating Great Teams
"Just as Spotify has worked hard to make all aspects of product development align well and work together - I see Jutta and John in this book exploring methods and processes that will work very well across the whole company." ~ Anders Ivarsson, Spotify
"I love how those practices [are] integrated and summarized into actionable recommendations." ~ Yves Lin, Titansoft
"Really wonderful balance of structure and space, rigor and creativity, that you're suggesting." ~ Michael Herman, Openspaceworld.org
"Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space and Sociocracy [...] makes an important case for companies to regard trust and autonomy the norm, rather than a privilege. [...] Overall a great overview of how leaders can reimagine the way power is distributed within their companies." ~ Aimee Groth, Author of The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia



Notice, how they emphasize that doing Agile (the mechanics) is different from being Agile (the mindset). The mindset lets you apply flexible Agile patterns not only for software development teams but for the whole company. Many experts are looking into implementing company-wide Agility. Yet, they work from one perspective. For example:




A Beyond Budgeting expert might say, "Stop fixing the budget annually, because otherwise you won't have the flexibility to react to frequent market changes."
An Open Space expert might say, "You need to make space for what you don’t know and can’t control, for totally new things to emerge. If people can follow their passion, you will be able to implement company-wide Agility, otherwise people will just do what they are asked."
A Sociocracy expert might say, "You first need to resolve the power structure, because as long as you have a hierarchy defined as top-down you will not become agile."
An Agile expert might say, "You need to start inspecting and adapting by using regular retrospectives in order to react flexibly, otherwise you will neither be able to learn from the market nor from within your company."



All of these perspectives are true, but the perspective is always from within the discipline.

Genres: Management, Business, Leadership

Audiobook

Published November 28, 2018

Reviews

[Bernd Schiffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview of Agile organisational development (Agile outside IT) and a specific approach (combination of Agile, Open Space, Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy). Very thorough with the details. Lots of pointers towards other sources for specific topics, in case the reader wants to dive deeper. I specifically liked the emphasis on experimentation.

[Bjoern Rochel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The further I got into the book, the less interesting it got. It gets some bonus points for trying to come up with a structure based on values and principles. And also for the thorough explanation of their reasoning. But the probes/experimentation part probably could have been just an appendix, which would have resulted in a much shorter book.

Not sure I would recommend it to friends

[Johan Edfeldt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gives a good overview of various concepts.
Like many of these kinds of books they should be read more than once and worked with as a companion and I will most likely return to this one in the future.
There are many take-away points but I like a simple one of flipping the perspective:
Thinking of Personnel, Customer, Owner in that order, and not the opposite, will bring together motivation and value in a strong way.

[Quinton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think there are some great concepts in here. Jutta shows real insight and understanding.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure if this book couldn't be better organized, and it could definitely be a little shorter, but there is so much in here that it should be applauded for it's scope and meaningful synthesis alone. It's stimulated my thinking in many many ways, and inspired me to read even more on a topic I'd previously thought I knew quite a lot about. If you're frustrated about the dysfunctional way the vast number of companies operate today, buy this book. You won't be disappointed

[Cory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really good topic and idea for combining the elements of the 4 main practices. Wanted more about the budgeting piece. Thought it was mainly focused on sociocracy and open space. It did give me lots of ideas to want to find about other areas though.

[Dennis Mansell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting 'best of everything' look at the future of work.