Quotes from Stephen Denning

Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart.

small batches of work, small teams, short cycles, and quick feedback—in effect, "small everything.

We found in surveys of Agile teams that some 80 percent to 90 percent of Agile teams perceive tension between the way the Agile team is run and the way the whole organization is run. In half of those cases, the tension was "serious.

Agile management is about working smarter rather than harder. It's not about doing more work in less time: It's about generating more value from less work.

If you are thinking about Agile as a set of tools and processes, you're looking for the wrong thing. You can't go to the store and "buy some Agile management.

One reason that it's difficult to understand is that twentieth-century managers had learned to parrot phrases like "The customer is number one!" while continuing to run the organization as an internally focused, top-down bureaucracy interested in delivering value to shareholders.

In the Agile organization, "customer focus" means something very different. In firms that have embraced Agile, everyone is passionately obsessed with delivering more value to customers. Everyone in the organization has a clear line of sight to the ultimate customer and can see how their work is adding value to that customer—or not. If their work isn't adding value to any customer or user, then an immediate question arises as to why the work is being done at all.

Many firms fail to see that since generally all organizations have access to the same rapidly evolving technology, competitive advantage flows not from the technology itself but rather from the agility with which organizations understand and adapt the technology to meet customers' real needs.

In other words, firms don't have to be "born Agile," like Spotify. Even big, old firms can undertake an Agile transformation if they set their minds and hearts to it—and stick with it.

The premise of Agile management is that empowering bottom-up innovation will steadily add significant value for customers and the firm.

The task of delighting customers is thus the job of everyone. It requires the efforts of everyone in the corporation—and beyond—to share insights and figure out ways to handle a challenge that is much more difficult than merely delivering a product or service.

Leadership is essentially a task of persuasion—of winning people's minds and hearts.

The client gets to see the next iteration of the system every three weeks, instead of waiting five years for one "big bang" delivery.

I asked Carlson what he did in those early years to get people's buy-in. Carlson says he included everyone but he worked mainly with the early adopters. "You never get a 100 percent," he says. "We focused on the people who wanted to work this way. You can't convert everyone on day one. That takes years.