Agile Leadership Explained: We Can All Be Agile Leaders and Change the World Together!

By Maggie Sun

     In an eloquent language, this book not only provides a perspicuous explanation of agile leadership from business management perspective, but also brings a refreshing and inspiring view of agile leadership beyond business boundaries by translating it into a philosophy that can be applied to the whole world in all life spheres. While the book offers practical knowledge and tools concerning agile transformation (e.g. four organizational shifts and 3D Agile Leader Model, etc.) for business people, it also calls for all global citizens to evolve into agile leaders and change the world together to a better place.

     The first part of the book introduces the term of VUCA, following a holistic overview of the most consequential global changes as well as their impacts on our happiness that's tied to agile leadership.

     The second part succinctly expounds the very origin of agile and how it is adopted by commercial organizations worldwide from technical part to enterprise-wide level. The book goes on to clarify why the most essential part of agile is agile leadership through a simple interpretation of the complex adaptive system theory, then further presents trust-based empowerment to be the key to developing agile leadership, as corroborated in the practices of Beyond Budgeting and Management Plasticity. Following that, agile philosophy is introduced as the extension of agile leadership out of business boundaries, also as the secret to a happy life in the changing world for everyone.

     In the final part, the book focuses on providing different components of various societies with inspirations and hands-on suggestions as to how to make the world a better place by becoming true agile leaders. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maggie Sun
• Release date: Feb 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393934226

Maggie Sun

Maggie Sun is a writer and a business strategy analyst specializing in agile leadership development and organizational agile transformation. She grew up in Shanghai, obtained her MBA degree in Montreal, and gathered multi-cultural, multi-industrial corporate experiences across Canada, Belgium, and China. Her transcontinental adventures make her a resourceful and passionate writer whose works are inspiring and fun! She lives in Quebec with her husband and two daughters in a house with a lovely garden. When she’s not working, she continues pursuing her dream in creative writing.

Book preview

Part 1 Global changes

The world today is both confusing and confused!

Only yesterday my neighbour told me that she successfully lost 10 pounds with ketogenic diet (high fat and low carb), now I am reading news about how generation Z displays a growing interest in vegetarian and vegan food. In a recent neighbourhood party, one of my friends asked a Chinese-Canadian lady whose side she took in the political tension between Canada and China, she only replied by asking: Do I need to pick a side? In the voguish talk show of Patriot Act, the episode about fast fashion that discloses how cheap clothing brands churn out new designs every few days and generate enormous waste and pollution makes people wonder: Is businesses going agile really a good thing?

We are living in an extremely fickle world where everything is altering and shifting. If we don’t keep up with the changes, we are either boomers or laggards.

We are confused because we are all inundated by vast amount of cheap information that provides misleading and partial views of the world, while what we really need are a comprehensive understanding of global changes and a holistic approach to addressing them.

That being so, let’s start from acquainting ourselves with some of the most talked-about universal phenomena and trends: what they are, how they are connected with each other, and how impactful they are to our life.

1.1 Technological advancement

I start with this is not because I am a fan of high-tech products, but because they are so overwhelmingly popular that their ubiquitous influence is felt by everyone. There are simply too many choices on consumer product and service markets dominated by digital information and devices: from smart TVs to digital cooking pots; from iPhones to robot vacuums; from smart home systems to self-driving cars ... Whatever simple-version appliance or device we used before, there is a smart version of it today, and smarter versions to follow, not to mention so many never-existed-before innovations being tried out by early adopters and trying to find their way to every modern household in the near future.

Among all the consumer digital devices, the most frequently used is smartphone, whose functions have evolved way beyond making phone calls. Most of us are so obsessed with it that rehabilitation centers for phone-addicts will become real and more populated than those for alcoholics or drug addicts. What makes a smartphone so irresistible are the innumerable digital products installed in it—applications for online music, videos, games, stores, and all the social media platforms. Let’s not forget the high-resolution camera in the phone that produces the best selfies for us to share in Instagram or Facebook.

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Incontrovertibly, digital technology is changing our daily life, brought by digital transformations of businesses in all industries, across countries and continents.

What is digital transformation? There’re various nuanced definitions of this term due to the popularity of digital talk. To make things simple, digital transformation can be safely defined as any rapid transformation that’s driven by advanced technologies, among which the hottest topics right now may include cloud computing, the Internet of Things, big data, block chain, and artificial intelligence.

Global spending on digital transformation (DX) is projected to reach 1.78 trillion U.S. dollars in 2022, 2.3 trillion in 2023, and 2.39 trillion in 2024 (statista, n.d.), and this spending is expected to continue increasing exponentially in the future.

Why are companies across industries worldwide so keen on investing in technology in their business operations? Because obviously, proper leverage of advanced technology can provide enormous privileges beyond mere improvement in operational efficiency. It can greatly help to transform the companies into long-term strategic winners by becoming nimble, customer-centric, innovative, and thus capable of adapting to or even leading the changes in the market—in other words, to be agile, which is one of the main (also trendy) topics that we will explore later.

Of course, government bodies worldwide are not lagged behind in the trend of digital investment. Wiser governments focus on key development sectors such as agriculture, education, and health care, and continuously hunt for effective strategies to help leverage the power of digital technologies for sustainable economic and social development.

What does that have to do with people’s daily life? An example from the biggest emerging economy will enlighten us on that. About 30% of Chinese primary and high school students are children scattered in rural areas of the country, left behind by their parents who are migrant workers in big cities. Apart from the general hardships of rural life, these children used to have to travel far and dangerous