University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
The Professional Agile Leader
Book

The Professional Agile Leader

The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations (The Professional Scrum Series)

Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner and Laurens Bonnema
Addison-Wesley, 2022
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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Background
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Companies need agility to manage today’s latest challenges. In this entry from the Professional Scrum Series by Scrum.org, experienced agility authors and consultants Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner and Laurens Bonnema provide business leaders with strategies and an eight-step game plan for introducing agility and developing agile teams. Their informative manual, which incorporates an extended, illustrative, fictional case history, will help business leaders avoid common missteps that can interfere with an effective transition to agile management.  

Summary

Traditional companies now need agile leaders, teams and cultures.

Companies that have been managed the same way for decades may require serious rethinking of their basic management principles to survive and succeed in today’s complex business environment. Meeting modern organizational challenges requires agile leadership, teamwork and corporate culture.

Agility is not “a state of being.” It’s a system for constant learning and adapting, an essential configuration for a contemporary organization. Agile leadership is a learned response to the business world’s demands. As such, agility is something leaders can achieve and teach. When this occurs on a company-wide, ongoing basis, leader by leader and team by team, your overall culture becomes more agile, more responsive. Companies need to master agility to deal with change and disruption as markets shift, customer needs multiply, external circumstances exert unexpected pressure, and competitors expand, contract or disappear.

The flawed idea that employees aren’t intrinsically trying to excel leads to demotivating micromanagement.

To remain viable, many...

About the Authors

Consultant Ron Eringa, an expert in leading IT companies in using agile and Scrum, founded the Agile Leadership School and co-founded Evolutionary Leadership. Kurt Bittner is also the co-author or editor of Mastering Professional Scrum, The Zombie Scrum Survival Guide, The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum, The Professional Scrum Team, and other books. Frequent conference speaker and consultant Laurens Bonnema, a Professional Scrum Trainer among other titles, is the co-author of Inspirerend projectmanagement met Agile (in Dutch).

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