The Age of Agile
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
It’s a little weird to give a random business book 5 stars but hear me out. Probably two-thirds of The Age of Agile is a useful but entirely standard primer on what Agile methodology is, why you should apply it to your company, and tips and tricks on how to do so. If that were the entire book we’d be sitting at a solid 3 stars and a very short review.
But tucked into the middle of the book is the sharpest critique I’ve seen of the shareholder-first, profits-over-people mentality that has driven the business world for decades. I’m not entirely sure why it's in the book but WOW did I enjoy reading it. I may even go buy a physical copy to go back through and annotate. Denning carefully and methodically lays out the expectations people had of what would happen when companies first started going public, and again when they started
dramatically increasing the compensation packages that CEOs receive. They were logical assumptions - letting shareholders buy into the company, making financial performance public, and tying both CEO compensation and shareholder returns to company performance seems like a great way to guarantee everyone is fully invested in the success of the company. Then, with equal care and precision, Denning walks us through the actual consequences - how stock-based compensation incentivized both CEOs and shareholders to think only of maximizing the short term, inhibiting a company’s ability to invest in the future. This is further exacerbated by the ever-shortening tenure of CEOs; a leader who expects to still be at the company in 15 years will look that far ahead to make sure the company is doing as well or better by then. A CEO who doesn’t expect to be there in 10 years has no reason to invest in the long term, but quite a lot of incentive to cut costs as far as possible to artificially inflate profit margins in the immediate future.
I wish this had been required reading in business school, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in where the business landscape is and where it could be. The decades long emphasis on cutting costs - outsourcing manufacturing and jobs, practicing just-in-time inventory and short staffing practices - is a big part of why Covid disrupted the economy as much as it did, and Denning does an excellent job explaining both why people thought that was the best practice at the time and why we should now be taking down the lessons learned and making better choices.
This was a required reading for my job, so there was really only one thing to pair it with - my current go-to kombucha. Nothing exciting, but a dependable pick me up when it’s a little too late in the afternoon for a coffee but I need something to make it to the end of the day.
