Agile Management
Bartleby The fashion for agile management is spreading Executives need to be a cross between Spider-Man and Simone Biles The Economist Print edition | Business Jul 5th 2018 AGILITY is such a modish word in modern management theory that it can seem as if the ideal corporate executive would be a combination of Spider-Man and Simone Biles, a gymnast. The concept has its roots in the idea of “lean management”, developed by Toyota in car manufacturing, and in the “Agile manifesto” drawn up by a group of software developers back in 2001. Big software-development projects were (and are) notorious for producing costly, late and cumbersome results. The idea of agility was to focus on small, innovative and multi-disciplinary teams. Among the manifesto’s principles were that “individuals and interactions” were more important than “processes and tools”, and that responding to change was better than sticking to the plan. Latest stories The dos an...