NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. I am indebted to the following formulation by Alan Murray, who wrote: “It is our belief that the world is in the midst of a new industrial revolution, driven by technology that is connecting everyone and everything, everywhere and all the time, in a vast and intelligent network of interactive data that is creating an economic dynamic increasingly characterized by low or zero marginal costs, massive returns to scale and platform economics.” A. Murray, “Six Fundamental Truths About the 21st Century Corporation,” Fortune, October 22, 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/10/22/six-truths-21st-century-corporation/. My book selects elements of this formulation but puts less emphasis on the competitive advantage created by technology or data and instead gives more emphasis to the different management being used to deploy the technology and the data. It also stresses the outcome for customers and end users: instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale. Today, for the most part, technology and data are commodities. See also G. Colvin, “Why Every Aspect of Your Business Is About to Change,” Fortune, October 22, 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/10/22/the-21st-century-corporation-new-business-models/.

2. Amazon was criticized by analysts for years for missing profit targets, and worse, not even focusing on profits. Now it’s bigger than all the other publicly traded retailers put together. Jeff Desjardins, “The Extraordinary Size of Amazon in One Chart,” Business Insider, January 3, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/the-extraordinary-size-of-amazon-in-one-chart-2017-1.

3. Google was founded in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google’s parent company is now Alphabet Inc., an American multinational conglomerate created on October 2, 2015, by the two founders of Google.

4. A. Murray, “The End of Management,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2010, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704476104575439723695579664.

5. One key factor: Internally driven innovation and new technology often generate changes that customers don’t want or are not willing to pay for.

6. One sign of the scale of the change: Scrum Alliance Inc. has more than a half million members and continues to grow rapidly. The gains of Agile management are not inevitable. It is possible, as later chapters in this book explain, that firms may decide to implement only some, or even none, of the components of Agile management.

7. Many of the elements of Agile management were around long before the Agile Manifesto. Since time immemorial, artists have worked in an iterative fashion: Masterpieces usually evolve through trial and error, rather than emerging perfect from an initial plan. In the nineteenth century, Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of the Prussian (later German) General Staff, developed and applied the concept of Auftragstaktik to cope with uncertainty. Iterative work practices were promoted in the 1930s by Walter Shewhart, a quality expert at Bell Labs. Agile has considerable overlap with design thinking that stems from Herbert A. Simon’s book The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). Self-organizing teams have been the staple of new product development for decades. Reducing inventory and delivering value to clients with each iteration are at the heart of lean manufacturing, which was invented by Toyota some fifty years ago. Continuous self-improvement has been a legacy from the total quality movement for more than half a century. Finding ways to measure client delight and the consequent impact on firm growth has been systematically studied by Fred Reichheld and his colleagues at the consulting firm Bain & Company for over twenty-five years.

8. Manifesto for Agile Software Development (http://www.agilemanifesto.org/) is a set of principles for software development in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. The full text is included in Box 1-1 at the end of Chapter 1. For some thoughts on the meaning of the values of the Agile Manifesto, see Peter Stevens, “How ‘Agile’ Are You?,” August 31, 2016, https://saat-network.ch/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Peters-5-Question-Agile-Assessment-RC2.pdf; see also “Five Simple Questions to Determine If You Have the Agile Mindset,” Scrum Breakfast (blog), August 25, 2016, http://www.scrum-breakfast.com/2016/08/five-simple-questions-to-determine-if.html.

9. The struggle to reintroduce Agile management to manufacturing is ironic in the sense that many of the historical antecedents of Agile were in manufacturing. See, for example, H. Takeuchi and I. Nonaka, “The New New Product Development Game,” Harvard Business Review, January 1986, https://hbr.org/1986/01/the-new-new-product-development-game. See also S. Denning, “Transformational Leadership in Agile Manufacturing,” Forbes.com, August 1, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/08/01/transformational-leadership-in-agile-manufacturing-wikispeed/. In their book Scrum (New York: Crown Publishing, 2014, 35–36), Jeff and J. J. Sutherland describe an illuminating game that teaches the role of Agile management in manufacturing through building paper airplanes by way of W. Edwards Deming’s cycle of Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA).

10. S. Denning, “The Best-Kept Management Secret on the Planet,” Forbes.com, April 12, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/04/09/the-best-kept-management-secret-on-the-planet-agile/.

11. Innosight, “Creative Destruction Whips Through Corporate America: S&P 500 Lifespans Are Shrinking,” February 2012, http://www.inno-sight.com/innovation-resources/strategy-innovation/upload/creative-destruction-whips-through-corporate-america_final2015.pdf.

12. Martin Reeves, Simon Levin, Daichi Ueda, “The Biology of Corporate Survival,” Harvard Business Review, January–February 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/01/the-biology-of-corporate-survival.

13. M. Andreesen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.

14. The SD Learning Consortium (SDLC) is a nonprofit corporation registered in Virginia. The author is an unpaid pro bono director of the SDLC. The 2016 report of the SDLC titled “The Entrepreneurial Organization at Scale” is available at http://sdlearningconsortium.org/index.php/home/what-we-have-learned/full-report-2016/. A predecessor of the SD Learning Consortium was sponsored by Scrum Alliance in 2015.

15. On November 18, 2016, Julian Birkinshaw, professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School and director of the Deloitte Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, declared provocatively that we are living in “the Age of Agile.” S. Denning, “The Age of Agile: What Every CEO Needs to Know,” Forbes.com, December 9, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/12/09/the-age-of-agile-what-every-ceo-needs-to-know/.

CHAPTER 1

1. P. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 313.

2. C. Johnson, “Who Are We?? Chris Johnson from Idea to Execution: Spotify’s Discover Weekly,” SlideShare, November 15, 2015, http://www.slideshare.net/MrChrisJohnson/from-idea-to-execution-spotifys-discover-weekly/2-Who_are_WeChris_Johnson_Edward.

3. Adam Pasick, “The Magic That Makes Spotify’s Discover Weekly Playlists So Damn Good,” Quartz, December 21, 2015, http://qz.com/571007/the-magic-that-makes-spotifys-discover-weekly-playlists-so-damn-good/.

4. Ibid.

5. Michael Harte, “Digital Transformation in Banking,” YouTube video, 19:49, July 13, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6mqxcevZj0.

6. D. K. Rigby, J. Sutherland, and H. Takeuchi, “Embracing Agile,” Harvard Business Review, April 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/05/embracing-agile.

7. M. Lurie, “The Five Disciplines of Agile Organizations,” in Agility Hackathon E-book: Compilation of Participants’ Experiences and Learnings, McKinsey & Company, April 2016.

8. The report of the 2016 site visits by the SD Learning Consortium is available at http://sdlearningconsortium.org/index.php/home/what-we-have-learned/full-report-2016/. The report of the 2015 site visits of the Learning Consortium organized by the Scrum Alliance is available at http://sdlearningconsortium.org/index.php/home/what-we-have-learned/full-report-2015/.

9. A. Murray, “Six Fundamental Truths About the 21st Century Corporation,” Fortune, October 22, 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/10/22/six-truths-21st-century-corporation/.

10. The Ericsson example was first published in “The Entrepreneurial Organization at Scale,” Report of the SD Learning Consortium, November 9, 2016, 3, http://sdlearningconsortium.org/wp-content/uploads/Report-r28-NOV-9-2016-PUBLIC-VERSION.pdf, and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons license.

11. The forty Agile methods delineated by Craig Smith are depicted in a clever graphic by Australian designer Lynne Cazaly, in Steve Denning, “Explaining Agile,” Forbes.com, September 8, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/09/08/explaining-agile/.

12. General Stanley McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, Kindle Edition, 2013); Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996).

13. J. Clifton, “Workplace Disruption: From Annual Reviews to Coaching,” Gallup.com, February 15, 2017, http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/203876/workplace-disruption-annual-reviews-coaching.aspx.

14. E. Schmidt and J. Rosenberg, How Google Works (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014), 86.

15. J. Kotter, Accelerate (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).

16. For dual operating systems, see Kotter, Accelerate, and S. D. Anthony, C. G. Gilbert, and M. W. Johnson, Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today’s Business While Creating the Future (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017). For knowledge funnels with design thinking, see R. Martin, The Design of Business (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2009). Martin describes a knowledge funnel by which organizations progressively figure out mysteries, which then turn into business heuristics that can be exploited with the addition of judgment, and eventually algorithms, which can be exploited precisely.

17. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 10–11.

CHAPTER 2

1. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blond & Briggs, 1973), 259.

2. H. Shaughnessy, The Elastic Enterprise: The New Manifesto for Business Revolution (Dublin, Ohio, Telemachus Press, 2012).

3. “The Newton” refers to a series of personal digital assistants (PDAs) developed and marketed by Apple Inc. Apple launched the platform in 1987 and shipped the first devices in 1993. Production officially ended on February 27, 1998. According to former Apple CEO John Sculley, the corporation invested approximately US$100 million to develop the Newton.

4. R. Stross, “Billion Dollar Flop: Airforce Stumbles on Software Plan,” New York Times, December 9, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/technology/air-force-stumbles-over-software-modernization-project.html. See also S. Denning, “Reconciling Innovation with Control: A $1.3 Billion Lesson in Agile,” Forbes.com, December 11, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/12/11/reconciling-innovation-with-control-the-air-forces-1-3-billion-lesson-in-agile/.

5. Stross, “Billion Dollar Flop.”

6. Stross, Ibid.

7. “SAAB JAS-39 Sweden (Super Fighter),” YouTube video, 2:51, October 13, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOw0Og0i8pA.

8. S. Joshi, “Gripen Operational Cost Lowest of All Western Fighters: Jane’s,” StratPost, July 4, 2012, http://www.stratpost.com/gripen-operational-cost-lowest-of-all-western-fighters-janes.

9. Ibid.

10. B. Sweetman, “Is Saab’s New Gripen the Future of Fighters?,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, March 24, 2014, http://aviation-week.com/defense/saab-s-new-gripen-future-fighters.

11. J. Hirsch, “Elon Musk: Model S Not a Car but a ‘Sophisticated Computer on Wheels,” LA Times, March 19, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-musk-computer-on-wheels-20150319-story.html.

12. S. Denning, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 118–121.

13. H. Takeuchi and I. Nonaka, “The New New Product Development Game,” Harvard Business Review, January 1986, https://hbr.org/1986/01/the-new-new-product-development-game.

14. J. P. Womack and D. T. Jones, T he Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production—Toyota’s Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry (New York: Free Press, 1990). The book recorded extraordinary differences in outcomes between factories using Toyota’s approach (which the book called “lean”) and those run on traditional lines (which it called “mass manufacturing”). On the design side, the lean approach was more productive on every measurable aspect. It wasn’t a difference between Japanese factories and U.S. factories. In fact, some of the best factories were in the United States and some of the worst were in Japan. What made the difference was how the factory was run. Nor was it a question of who was running the plant. In the study, the top-rated plant in terms of quality and productivity wasn’t a Japanese plant at all. It was a Ford plant in Hermosillo, Mexico.

15. These site visits took place in 2015 under the auspices of the Learning Consortium for the Creative Economy organized by Scrum Alliance, and in 2016 and in 2017 under the auspices of the SD Learning Consortium.

16. J. Rozovsky, “The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team,” re:Work (blog), November 17, 2015, https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/; C. Duhigg, “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” New York Times, February 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html.

17. S. Denning, “The Joy of Work: Menlo Innovations,” Forbes.com, August 2, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/08/02/the-joy-of-work-menlo-innovations/.

18. D. H. Pink, Drive (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009).

19. S. Denning, “From CEO Takers to CEO Makers,” Forbes.com, August 20, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/08/20/from-ceo-takers-to-ceo-makers-the-great-transformation/.

20. In general, the Agile movement has avoided “New Age” talk about “the next stage of human consciousness,” as promoted by Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness (Nelson Parker, 2014). It also stayed away from the linguistic extremes of the holacracy movement that sometimes talks of doing away with job titles, managers, and hierarchy. See S. Denning, “No Managers, No Hierarchy, No Way,” Forbes.com, April 18, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/04/18/no-managers-no-hierarchy-no-way/; and S. Denning, “Making Sense of Zappos and Holacracy,” Forbes.com, January 15, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/01/15/making-sense-of-zappos-and-holacracy/; S. Denning, “Is Holacracy Succeeding at Zappos,” Forbes.com, May 23, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/05/23/is-holacracy-succeeding-at-zappos/. Hierarchy still exists in Agile management, but it is for the most part a hierarchy of competence, not a hierarchy of authority.

CHAPTER 3

1. “Attribution of Schopenhauer’s Three Stages of Truth,” discussion in “Quotes Debunked,” November 5, 2012, https://www.metabunk.org/attribution-of-schopenhauers-three-stages-of-truth.t897/.

2. Copernicus was not the first person to formulate the sun-centered view of the universe. Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310–c. 230 BC), an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician, presented the first known heliocentric model. Claudius Ptolemy preferred the geocentric model that dominated until the heliocentric theory was successfully revived by Copernicus, after which Johannes Kepler described planetary motions with greater accuracy with what are known as Kepler’s laws, and Isaac Newton gave a theoretical explanation based on laws of gravitational attraction and dynamics.

3. The plausibility of Roman Catholic theology and the Divine Right of Kings was implicitly dependent in part on the notion that the earth is the physical center of the universe, thereby warranting the attentions of a Divine Being. As it became apparent that the earth is a tiny speck of dust in an infinitely vast universe, that plausibility came under more intensive questioning.

4. T. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1957), 94.

5. P. Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: HarperCollins, 1954), 37.

6. Ibid.

7. M. Jensen and K. Murphy, “CEO Incentives—It’s Not How Much You Pay, But How,” Harvard Business Review, May 1990, https://hbr.org/1990/05/ceo-incentives-its-not-how-much-you-pay-but-how.

8. R. Gulati, Reorganize for Resilience (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2010).

9. K. R. Jamison, Exuberance: The Passion for Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), 5.

10. J. Clifton, “Workplace Disruption: From Annual Reviews to Coaching,” Gallup.com, February 15, 2017, http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/203876/workplace-disruption-annual-reviews-coaching.aspx.

11. A. Koller, “Stephen Fry on Things He Had Learned in Life,” Design Research (blog), January 17, 2013, http://blog.andreaskoller.com/2013/01/stephen-fry-on-things-he-has-learned-in-life/.

12. S. Denning, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 118-120.

13. T. L. Friedman, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 95.

14. “Scott Galloway at DLC 2017,” YouTube video, 23:06, January 20, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFxdgZ1az9s&feature=youtu.be&t=15s.

15. S. Galloway, “Alexa: How Can We Kill Brands?,” No Mercy/No Malice, May 12, 2017, https://www.l2inc.com/no-mercy-no-malice/alexa-how-can-we-kill-brands.

16. In traditional top-down bureaucracies, with multiple vertical layers of authority and many different departments and divisions, work jams are occurring all over the organization on a daily basis, though typically, no one recognizes them or does anything about them. Work sits waiting in queues. Approvals hold things up. Customers try to get answers and wait for responses. Well-intended cost savings implemented in one part of the organization are slowing things down in another part of the organization, retarding the overall delivery of value to customers. Big production runs are particularly problematic, because they maximize work in process and inventory, generating direct costs of working capital and warehousing, hiding quality problems, and causing noxious secondary effects.

17. G. Stalk, “Time—The Next Source of Competitive Advantage,” Harvard Business Review, July 1988, https://hbr.org/1988/07/time-the-next-source-of-competitive-advantage.

18. P. Noonan, “A Caveman Won’t Beat a Salesman,” Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2011, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203611404577044613194688678.

19. J. Tapper, “General Electric Paid No Federal Taxes in 2010,” ABCNews.com, March 25, 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/general-electric-paid-federal-taxes-2010/story?id=13224558.

20. S. Denning, “Retirement Heist: How Firms Plunder Workers’ Nest Eggs,” Forbes.com, October 19, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/10/19/retirement-heist-how-firms-plunder-workers-nest-eggs/.

21. S. Denning, “Why Are Fannie and Freddie CEOs Paid So Much?,” Forbes.com, November 16, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/16/why-are-fannie-freddie-ceos-paid-so-much/.

22. S. Denning, “Why Amazon Can’t Make a Kindle in the U.S.A.,” Forbes.com, August 17, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/011/08/17/why-amazon-cant-make-a-kindle-in-the-usa/.

23. S. Denning, “Resisting the Lure of Short-Termism,” Forbes.com, January 8, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/01/08/resisting-the-lure-of-short-termism-how-to-achieve-long-term-growth/.

24. Denning, “Why Are Fannie and Freddie CEOs Paid So Much?” By creating the basis for questioning the legitimacy of compensation for corporate leaders, the Law of the Customer enables the true financial and social worth of corporate leaders to be examined and recalibrated. Top managers will continue to exist, but the extraordinary compensation and prerogatives of the C-suite will come under increasing scrutiny, both in absolute terms of what the leaders themselves are contributing and also relative to creative talent that is truly adding real value to customers.

25. T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

26. F. W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911), 7.

CHAPTER 4

1. S. McChrystal, T. Collins, D. Silverman, and C. Fussell, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2015), 71–72.

2. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams, 69–70.

3. Ibid., 127.

4. Ibid., 118.

5. Ibid., 122.

6. Ibid., 123.

7. Ibid., 127.

8. Ibid., 127–128.

9. Ibid., 156.

10. Ibid., 84.

11. S. Denning, “The Key Missing Leadership Ingredient: Part 2: The Military,” Forbes.com, July 31, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/07/31/the-key-missing-leadership-ingredient-part-2-the-military/. “Mission command” over “detailed command” has been championed by the U.S. military, but overall, the military structure remains top-down and bureaucratic. See Chapter 11.

12. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams, 159.

13. Ibid., 161.

14. Ibid., 175–176.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 225–256.

17. Ibid., 243. In management matters, there is always a risk of apparent oversimplification, as complex events risk being attributed to a single cause. There are always multiple causes and multiple outcomes. The ultimate results are the convergence of many separate and independent developments and can lead to diverse effects that can go for generations.

18. The U.S. Task Force’s network in Iraq helped to produce tactical “wins” in terms of the capture of former president Saddam Hussein and the killing of the extremist leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi. However, in broader terms, the story of General McChrystal’s Task Force in Iraq does not show that the Law of the Network by itself is any kind of panacea in a complex political situation. The Task Force’s network was a better organizational arrangement for achieving the goal that had been assigned to it by the U.S. government, but was the goal itself sound? The U.S. government had decided to invade Iraq, in pursuit of “weapons of mass destruction,” which turned out not to exist. In May 2003, shortly after the initial invasion, United States president George W. Bush, in front of a sign that declared “Mission Accomplished,” declared an “end to major combat operations in Iraq.” As guerilla warfare in Iraq steadily took shape, commanders on the ground knew that they were dealing with an insurgency; see S. McChrystal, My Share of the Task (New York: Penguin, 2013), 122. Yet at higher levels, the U.S. government was reluctant to accept that fact. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even refused for several years to allow the use of the term “insurgency.” The U.S. government’s overall strategy remained one of finding and killing “bad guys.” The Task Force in Iraq was successfully doing that. It was killing more, capturing more, and its facilities were full of thousands of detainees. But no matter how many “bad guys” the Task Force killed, there were more to take their place. In this regard, the accidental killing of innocent civilians, the harsh interrogations of Iraqi detainees, and the horrifying abuses that occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison obviously didn’t help. The U.S. government strategy at the time was paying insufficient attention to the Law of the Customer: Ultimate success would depend on winning the hearts or minds of the Iraqi people. “The classic doctrine, which was developed by the British in Malaya in the nineteen-forties and fifties, says that counterinsurgency warfare is twenty per cent military and eighty per cent political,” writes analyst George Packer. “The focus of operations is on the civilian population: isolating residents from insurgents, providing security, building a police force, and allowing political and economic development to take place so that the government commands the allegiance of its citizens. A counterinsurgency strategy involves both offensive and defensive operations, but there is an emphasis on using the minimum amount of force necessary. For all these reasons, such a strategy is extremely hard to carry out, especially for the American military, which [focuses] on combat operations. Counterinsurgency cuts deeply against the Army’s institutional instincts.” The U.S. Task Force in Iraq had been assigned the “20 percent military” part of the mission, but the U.S. government never fully embraced, or committed the resources necessary for, accomplishing the “80 percent political” part of the mission (George Packer, “The Lesson of Tal Afar,” The New Yorker, April 10, 2006, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/10/the-lesson-of-tal-afar). Yet despite lack of support from other parts of the government, operations in Iraq were demonstrating the potential of a “counterinsurgency” strategy: General James Mattis in Fallujah, Colonel H. R. McMaster in Tal Afar near the Syrian border, and General David Petraeus in Mosul began putting a focus on securing the population and bringing economic development, not just killing “the enemy.” They sent troops into the cities and kept them there, establishing connections with local leaders and Iraqi Army units, gathering intelligence from the local population on the extremists, providing security in the streets, and working with the warring factions. Progress was significant, although the gains didn’t last after these commanders moved on, as the U.S. government was slow to embrace and sustain full support for a counterinsurgency strategy. See F. Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 303; and McChrystal, My Share of the Task, 129. Organizational success ultimately depends on both “doing the right thing” and “doing it right.” In mastering the Law of the Network, the U.S. Army Task Force got closer to “doing it right” in terms of accomplishing its part of the mission. But that was not enough for broader political success when the overall U.S. government strategy was flawed.

19. Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2003), 21. The network arrangement is, Perez writes, “replicated in many other organizations confronted with a large and complex task in government, in hospitals, in universities, in trade unions and political parties. In the West and in the Soviet system, in developed and developing countries.”

20. Alcoholics Anonymous, General Service Office, “A.A. Fact File,” June 2013, http://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/m-24_aafactfile.pdf.

21. M. Gladwell, “The Cellular Church,” The New Yorker, September 12, 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/09/12/the-cellular-church.

22. S. Denning, “John Hagel’s Wake-up Call for Business,” Forbes.com, January 2, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/01/02/john-hagels-wake-up-call-for-business-how-to-launch-a-change-movement/.

23. A top-down, all-or-nothing approach may create a backlash, so even if a company appears to succeed, the sustainability of the effort is likely to be in question. The cost of victory may be too high. There’s also a risk that a poorly implemented change will discredit the very idea of managing without bureaucracy for a long time to come.

24. S. Denning, “Gary Hamel’s $3 Trillion Prize for Killing Bureaucracy,” Forbes.com, March 29, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/03/29/gary-hamels-3-trillion-prize-for-killing-bureaucracy/.

CHAPTER 5

1. B. Harry, “Agile Project Management in Visual Studio ALM V.Next,” Brian Harry’s Blog, June 14, 2011, https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2011/06/14/agile-project-management-in-visual-studio-alm-v-next/.

2. K. Schwaber, “Microsoft and Brian Harry,” Ken Schwaber’s Blog: Telling It Like It Is, July 18, 2011, https://kenschwaber.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/microsoft-and-brian-harry/.

3. B. Harry, “Self-forming Teams at Scale,” Brian Harry’s Blog, July 24, 2015, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2015/07/24/self-forming-teams-at-scale.aspx.

CHAPTER 6

1. L. Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2013), ix.

2. S. Anthony, “What Do You Really Mean by Business ‘Transformation,’” Harvard Business Review, February 29, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/02/what-do-you-really-mean-by-business-transformation.

3. C. M. Christensen, K. Dillon, T. Hall, and D. Duncan, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 37.

4. D. Brooks, “The Creative Monopoly,” New York Times, April 24, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/opinion/brooks-the-creative-monopoly.html.

5. P. Vlaskovits, “Henry Ford, Innovation, and That ‘Faster Horse’ Quote,” Harvard Business Review, August 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast. There is no evidence that Henry Ford ever made this statement.

6. W. C. Kim and R. Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2015).

7. A/B testing involves comparing two versions of a web page to find out which one performs better. The two variants are shown to different visitors at the same time. The test enables developers to determine which version gives the better response rate.

8. Kim and Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy, 40.

9. There is now even a movement afoot called “anti-lean-startups,” which makes the case for adopting a different approach for major innovation that involves scientific breakthroughs; see D. Mortensen, “Why Anti-Lean Startups Are Back,” LinkedIn Pulse, November 2, 2016, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-anti-lean-startups-back-dennis-r-mortensen.

10. N. Schwieters, “The End of Conventional Industry Sectors,” strategy + business, January 3, 2017, https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/The-End-of-Conventional-Industry-Sectors.

11. Christensen et al., Competing Against Luck, 89.

12. C. R. Carlson and W. W. Wilmot, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want (New York: Crown Business, 2006).

13. C. Carlson, “‘Do You Have a Value-Creation Playbook?’ ‘No,’” Drucker Forum Blog, December 7, 2016, https://www.druckerforum.org/blog/?p=1429.

14. A. Venkataraman, “Can Innovation Be Learned or Taught?,” Quora, January 20, 2017, https://www.quora.com/Can-innovation-be-learned-or-taught/answer/Anand-Venkataraman.

15. W. C. Kim and R. Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), 90.

16. Venkataraman, “Can Innovation Be Learned or Taught?”

17. Shaughnessy quoted in S. Denning, “How Apple Achieves Massive Scale Without Pain,” Forbes.com, September 3, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/09/03/how-the-elastic-enterprise-defeats-the-sclerosis-of-scale/.

18. Schwieters, “The End of Conventional Industry Sectors.”

19. Shaughnessy quoted in S. Denning, “How the Elastic Enterprise Defeats the Sclerosis of Scale,” Forbes.com, September 3, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/09/03/how-the-elastic-enterprise-defeats-the-sclerosis-of-scale/.

20. S. Denning, “John Hagel’s Wake-up Call for Business,” Forbes.com, January 2, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/01/02/john-hagels-wake-up-call-for-business-how-to-launch-a-change-movement/.

21. Venkataraman, “Can Innovation Be Learned or Taught?”

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

CHAPTER 7

1. L. Gerstner, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 182.

2. W. Wilmot and J. Hocker, Interpersonal Conflict (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010). Wilmot suggested that he and Carlson write a book together about the innovation model Carlson was introducing to SRI. See C. R. Carlson and W. W. Wilmot, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want (New York: Crown Business, 2006).

3. SRI’s Innovation-for-Impact Playbook was described in C. Carlson and W. Wilmot, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want. See also H. Kressel and N. Winarsky, If You Really Want to Change the World: A Guide to Creating, Building, and Sustaining Breakthrough Ventures (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2015).

4. See S. Denning, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011); S. Denning, “The Four Stories You Need to Lead Deep Organizational Change,” Forbes.com, July 25, 2011; http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/07/25/the-four-stories-you-need-to-lead-deep-organizational-change/; S. Denning, “How to Say No While Also Inspiring People,” Forbes.com, May 30, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/05/30/leadership-how-to-say-no-while-also-inspiring-people/.

PART TWO: MANAGEMENT TRAPS

1. “BlackRock CEO Larry Fink tells the world’s biggest business leaders to stop worrying about short-term results,” BusinessInsider.com, April 14, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-fink-letter-to-ceos-2015-4. In January 2015, Fink’s annual letter to CEOs stated: “Companies have begun to devote greater attention to these issues of long-term sustainability, but despite increased rhetorical commitment, they have continued to engage in buybacks at a furious pace.” BlackRock Inc., “Open Letter to S&P 500 CEOs,” https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/en-us/investor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter.

2. A historical perspective is sobering. In his book The Age of Heretics, Art Kleiner wrote about the corporate mavericks of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s who pioneered self-managing work teams. But most of their work didn’t stick. Yet today, the situation is different. The cost of bureaucracy—in terms of missed opportunities, underleveraged talents, and squandered innovation—is much higher. The competitive environment is much tougher. So, the importance of embracing Agile management is much higher than it was in the 1950s to 1970s. What was once an interesting experimental option is now a market-driven necessity.

CHAPTER 8

1. F. Guerrera, “Welch Condemns Share Price Focus,” Financial Times, March 12, 2009, https://www.ft.com/content/294ff1f2-0f27-11de-ba10-0000779fd2ac#axzz1eiLpL2PZ; S. Denning, “The World’s Dumbest Idea: Maximizing Shareholder Value,” Forbes.com, November 28, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing-shareholder-value-the-dumbest-idea-in-the-world/.

2. R. Martin, Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), 20. Denning, “The World’s Dumbest Idea.”

3. A rare exception to the total focus in the NFL on playing the game in accordance with the rules was the controversy involving the allegation that the New England Patriots deliberately underinflated footballs used in their victory against the Indianapolis Colts in the American Football Conference Championship Game of the 2014–2015 NFL playoffs. The controversy resulted in Patriots quarterback Tom Brady being suspended for four games and the team being fined $1 million and losing two draft picks.

4. J. R. Graham, C. R. Harvey, and S. Rajgopal, “Value Destruction and Financial Reporting Decisions,” Financial Analysts Journal 62, no. 6 (2006), http://www.cfapubs.org/doi/10.2469/faj.v62.n6.4351, cited in G. Mukunda, “The Price of Wall Street’s Power,” Harvard Business Review, June 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-price-of-wall-streets-power.

5. See R. Martin, Fixing the Game, 97.

6. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Regulation 142 (2002).

7. “Analyse This: The Enduring Power of the Biggest Idea in Business,” The Economist, March 31, 2016, http://www.economist.com/news/business/21695940-enduring-power-biggest-idea-business-analyse.

8. “The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership,” Harvard Business Review, May–June 2017.

9. Guerrera, “Welch Condemns Share Price Focus”; Denning, “The World’s Dumbest Idea.”

10. S. Denning, “The Hegemony of Shareholder Value Is Finally Ending,” Forbes.com, August 29, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/08/29/is-the-hegemony-of-shareholder-value-finally-ending/. The “garbage can” theory of organizations was developed to describe the mid-twentieth-century university by a trio of business school professors—Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen—but it had wider applicability to many large corporations. As goals were unclear, systems, rules, and procedures that had been devised to achieve financial and administrative order took on a life of their own. The processes themselves became the main preoccupation of those working within the organization. As employees oriented their lives around the processes, the purpose of the organization could get lost in a fog of bureaucracy. See M. D. Cohen, J.G. March, and J,P. Olsen, “A Garbage Can Model Of Organizational Choice,” Administrative Science Quarterly, March 1972, Vol 17, No. 1, 1-25.

11. See W. Kiechel, Lords of Strategy (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), 246, on “the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

12. M. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 133.

13. M. Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970, http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html.

14. How did the future Nobel Prize winner arrive at these conclusions? In a paper that accuses others of “analytical looseness and lack of rigor,” it’s curious that the paper assumes its conclusion at the outset. “In a free-enterprise, private-property system,” the article states flatly as an obvious truth requiring no justification or proof, “a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business”—namely, the shareholders. As a matter of law, this is incorrect. The executive is an employee of the corporation. In Friedman’s imaginary world, the executive and the stockholders have “a voluntary contractual arrangement” that is “clearly defined,” even though in the real world, no such contractual arrangement exists: The executive’s legal contract is with the corporation. In Friedman’s imaginary world of economic models, an organization is a mere “legal fiction.” Friedman defines the corporation out of existence in order to prove his predetermined conclusion.

15. M. C. Jensen and W. H. Meckling, “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure,” Journal of Financial Economics 3. no. 4 (1976), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=94043.

16. M. C. Jensen and K. J. Murphy, “CEO Incentives—It’s Not How Much You Pay, But How,” Harvard Business Review, May–June 1990, https://hbr.org/1990/05/ceo-incentives-its-not-how-much-you-pay-but-how.

17. S. Gandel, “What Caused Valeant’s Epic 90% Plunge?,” Reuters, March 20, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/03/20/valeant-timeline-scandal/.

18. P. Henning, “When Money Gets in the Way of Corporate Ethics,” New York Times, April 17, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/when-money-gets-in-the-way-of-corporate-ethics.html.

19. Associated Press, “Volkswagen executive pleads guilty in emissions scandal,” Los Angeles Times, August, 4, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-volkswagen-emissions-guilty-20170804-story.html.

20. See these articles by S. Denning: “Retirement Heist: How Firms Plunder Workers’ Nest Eggs,” Forbes.com, October 19, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/10/19/retirement-heist-how-firms-plunder-workers-nest-eggs/; “GE Discusses Retirement Heist,” Forbes.com, October 21, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/10/21/ge-discusses-retirement-heist/Heist Part 3,” Forbes.com, October 22, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/10/22/retirement-heist-part-3-ellen-schultz-replies-to-ge/; “How Your Pension Got Turned into Scotch or Cheese,” Forbes.com, April 22, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/04/22/sorry-about-your-pension-scotch-cheese-or-golf/.

21. J. Asker, J. Farre-Mensa, and A. Ljungqvist, “Corporate Investment and Stock Market Listing: A Puzzle?,” Review of Financial Studies 28, no. 2 (February 2015): 342–390, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1603484; S. Denning, “How CEOs Became Takers, Not Makers,” Forbes.com, August 18, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/08/18/hbr-how-ceos-became-takers-not-makers/.

22. S. Denning, “How the World’s Dumbest Idea Killed the Economic Recovery,” Forbes.com, July 29, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/29/how-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-killed-the-us-economic-recovery/; S. Denning, “Do We Need a Revolution in Management?,” Forbes.com, May 26, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/05/26/clayton-christensen-do-we-need-a-revolution-in-management/.

23. J. Wiens and C. Jackson, “The Importance of Young Firms for Economic Growth,” The Kauffman Foundation, September 13, 2015, http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/resources/entrepreneurship-policy-digest/the-importance-of-young-firms-for-economic-growth; S. Denning, “The Surprising Truth About Where New Jobs Come From,” Forbes.com, October 29, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/10/29/the-surprising-truth-about-where-new-jobs-come-from/.

24. P. Porter, J. Rivkin, and R. M. Kanter, “Competitiveness at the Crossroads: Findings of Harvard Business School’s 2012 Survey on U.S. Competitiveness,” Harvard Business School, February 2013, www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/pdf/competitiveness-at-a-crossroads.pdf.

25. S. Fleck, J. Glaser, and S. Sprague, “The Compensation-Productivity Gap: A Visual Essay,” Monthly Labor Review, January 2011, https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2011/01/art3full.pdf; S. Denning, “Debunking Myths About Worker Passion,” Forbes.com, October 8, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/10/08/debunking-myths-about-worker-passion/.

26. J. Plender, “Blowing the Whistle on Buybacks and Value Destruction,” Financial Times, March 1, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/0b71ca32-df0b-11e5-b67f-a61732c1d025.

27. O. Lobel, “Companies Compete but Won’t Let Their Workers Do the Same,” New York Times, May 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/opinion/noncompete-agreements-workers.html.

28. Denning, “Debunking Myths About Worker Passion.”

29. J. Clifton, “Workplace Disruption: From Annual Reviews to Coaching,” Gallup.com, February 15, 2017, http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/203876/workplace-disruption-annual-reviews-coaching.aspx.

30. S. Denning, “Will We Ever Trust Bankers Again?,” Forbes.com, February 6, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/02/06/will-we-ever-trust-bankers-again/. The derivatives market is often estimated at more than $1 quadrillion, or more than ten times the size of the total world gross domestic product; see J. B. Maverick, “How Big Is the Derivatives Market?,” Investopedia, May 27, 2015, http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052715/how-big-derivatives-market.asp.

31. “Banks Have Paid $321 Billion in Fines Since the Financial Crisis,” Reuters, March 2, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/03/03/bank-fines-2008-financial-crisis/.

32. “Five Banks to Plead Guilty to Global Currency Manipulation;” NBC News, May 20 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/five-banks-plead-guilty-global-currency-manipulation-n361921.

33. A. Viswanatha, “J. P. Morgan to Pay $307 Million over Client ‘Steering,’” December 18, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/j-p-morgan-to-pay-367-million-over-client-steering-1450457616; S. Denning, “Can the Big Banks Get on a Better Track?,” Forbes.com, December 26, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/12/26/can-the-big-banks-get-on-a-better-track/.

34. Henning, “When Money Gets in the Way of Corporate Ethics”; K. Mehrotra, L. J. Keller, and E. Pettersson, “Wells Fargo Reaches $110 Million Fake Accounts Settlement,” Bloomberg, March 28, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-28/wells-fargo-reaches-110-million-settlement-over-fake-accounts.

35. S. Polk, “What’s Wrong with Wall Street,” PBS NewsHour, August 23, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/whats-wrong-wall-street-culture-breeds-greed/. While being careful not to demonize all bankers, we should also be careful not to dismiss the horrific scale of the missteps. Thus Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Shiller writes in his book Finance and the Good Society about the 2008 crisis: “It is hard to blame the crisis on a sudden outbreak of malevolence. The situation during the boom that created the crisis was rather more like that on a highway where most cars are going just a little too much over the speed limit. In that situation, well-meaning drivers will just flow with the traffic. The U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in its final 2011 report, described the boom as ‘madness,’ but, whatever it was, it was not for the most part criminal.” Yet with banks being convicted of felonies with penalties amounting to more than $300 billion, the missteps go significantly beyond “cars going a little over the speed limit.”

36. N. D. Schwartz, “How Wall Street Bent Steel,” New York Times, December 6, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/business/timken-bows-to-investors-and-splits-in-two.html.

37. Relational ceased doing business in December 2015. See D. Benoit, “Relational Investors Closes Out Portfolio: Move Marks End of Pioneer Activist-Investing Firm,” Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/relational-investors-closes-out-portfolio-1455315877.

38. Benoit, “Relational Investors Closes Out Portfolio.”

39. Ibid.

40. Timken (TKR) share price as of April 2017 was $43; as of mid-2014: $68. That is a fall of 39 percent. TimkenSteel (TMST) share price as of April 2017 was $14; as of mid-2014: $50. That is a fall of 72 percent.

41. Schwartz, “How Wall Street Bent Steel.”

42. Ibid.

43. Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, “2016 U.S. Shareholder Activism Review and Analysis,” November 28, 2016, 11, https://sullcrom.com/siteFiles/Publications/SC_Publication_2016_U.S._Shareholder_Activism_Review_and_Analysis.pdf.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. A. Davis and L. Mishel, “CEO Pay Continues to Rise as Typical Workers Are Paid Less,” Economic Policy Institute, June 12, 2014, http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise/.

47. W. Lazonick and M. Hopkins, “Corporate Executives Are Making Way More Money Than Anybody Reports,” The Atlantic, September 15, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/executives-making-way-more-than-reported/499850/; W. Lazonick and M. Hopkins, “If the S.E.C. Measured CEO Pay Packages Properly, They Would Look Even More Outrageous,” Harvard Business Review, December 22, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/12/if-the-sec-measured-ceo-pay-packages-properly-they-would-look-even-more-outrageous.

48. J. M. Rose, A. M. Rose, C. Norman, and C. R. Mazza, “Will Disclosure of Friendship Ties Between Directors and CEOs Yield Perverse Effects?,” Accounting Review 89, no. 4 (July 2014): 1545–1563, http://aaajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2308/accr-50734.

49. Denning, “How the World’s Dumbest Idea Killed the Economic Recovery.”

50. R. Harding, “Corporate Investment: A Mysterious Divergence,” Financial Times, July 24, 2013, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8177af34-eb21-11e2-bfdb-00144feabdc0.html.

51. J. Hagel, J. S. Brown, M. Wooll, and A. de Maar, “The Paradox of Flows: Can Hope Flow from Fear?,” Deloitte University Press, December 13, 2016, https://dupress.deloitte.com/dup-us-en/topics/strategy/shift-index.html; S. Denning, “The Shift Index 2016: Why Can’t U.S. Firms Innovate?,” Forbes.com, December 15, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/12/15/shift-index-2016-shows-continuing-decline-in-performance-of-us-firms/.

52. N. Smith, “How Finance Came to Dominate the Economy,” Bloomberg, April 20, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-20/how-finance-came-to-dominate-the-u-s-economy.

53. How big is too big? In 2012, an International Monetary Fund study showed that “once the [financial] sector becomes too large—when private-sector credit reaches 80 percent to 100 percent of GDP—it actually inhibits growth and increases volatility. In the United States in 2012, private-sector credit was 184 percent of GDP.” See J. Arcand, E. Berkes, and U. Panizza, “Too Much Finance,” IMF Working Paper WP/12/161, June 2012, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12161.pdf.

54. Arcand, Berkes, and Panizza, “Too Much Finance.” It is sometimes questioned whether the economy is really declining. We are talking here about broad trends over more than half a century, during which the financial sector has grown significantly. “At its peak in 2006, the financial services sector contributed 8.3 percent to U.S. GDP, compared to 4.9 percent in 1980 and 2.8 percent in 1950”; see T. Taylor, “Why Did the U.S. Financial Sector Grow?,” Conversable Economist (blog), May 15, 2013, http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/013/05/why-did-us-financial-sector-grow.html. By 2015, the financial sector was more or less back to what it was in 2006; see N. Irwin, “Wall Street Is Back, Almost as Big as Ever,” New York Times, May 18, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/upshot/wall-street-is-back-almost-as-big-as-ever.html. “Between 1947 and 1974, GDP rose by about four per cent a year, on average, and many American households enjoyed a surge in living standards. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, growth dropped a bit, but still averaged more than three per cent. Since 2001, however, the rate of expansion has fallen below two per cent—less than half the postwar rate—and many economists believe that it will stay there, or fall even further. In economic-policy circles, the phrase of the moment is ‘secular stagnation.’” See J. Cassidy, “Printing Money,” The New Yorker, November 23, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/printing-money-books-john-cassidy. Accordingly, in terms of current macro statistics, the growth of the financial sector and the decline of the economy overall are confirmed. An argument is sometimes made that statistics like GDP don’t capture the gains being made by consumers. A television set that used to cost thousands of dollars now costs hundreds of dollars. True. But in other areas, such as finance, education, and health, the opposite has occurred: Expenditures have increased without any obvious gain in outcomes. Much of the financial sector’s growth consists of zero-sum gambling games, with no benefit to the real economy, yet this shows up as a benefit in the GDP. A law degree costs four times what it cost three decades ago, but is not noticeably better, yet this shows as a gain in GDP. Massive high-tech expenditures in medicine (which count as benefits) often yield only modest, zero, or even negative gains in terms of quality or length of life. The net of all these pluses and minuses has yet to be calculated. At this point, there is no basis for assuming a priori that the overcalculations exceed the undercalculations.

55. Bower and Paine, “The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership.”

56. “Analyse This: The Enduring Power of the Biggest Idea in Business,” The Economist, March 31, 2016, http://www.economist.com/news/business/21695940-enduring-power-biggest-idea-business-analyse.

57. “Analyse This,” The Economist; See also S. Denning, “The Economist Defends the World’s Dumbest Idea,” Forbes.com, April 3, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/04/03/the-economist-defends-the-worlds-dumbest-idea/.

58. S. Denning, “The Creative Economy in France, Forbes.com, July 13, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/07/13/the-creative-economy-in-france-givenchy-vinci/.

59. “Jack Ma Brings Alibaba to the U.S.,” interview by Lara Logan, CBS, September 28, 2014, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/alibaba-chairman-jack-ma-brings-company-to-america/.

60. E. Reguly, “Maybe It’s Time for CEOs to Put Shareholders Second,” Globe and Daily Mail, last updated September 27, 2013, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/maybe-its-time-for-ceos-to-put-shareholders-second/article14507016/.

61. S. Denning, “The New Management Paradigm: John Mackey’s Whole Foods,” Forbes.com, January 5, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/01/05/the-new-management-paradigm-john-mackeys-whole-foods/. As of mid-2017, Whole Foods was under pressure from the hedge fund Jana and the money manager Neuberger Berman to accelerate change; see L. Thomas, “Buying into the Turmoil: Investors Embrace the Risks,” New York Times, May 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/business/dealbook/whole-foods-board.html.

62. M. Benioff, “A Call for Stakeholder Activists,” Huffington Post, February 2, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marc-benioff/a-call-for-stakeholder-activists_b_6599000.html.

63. “BlackRock CEO Larry Fink tells the world’s biggest business leaders to stop worrying about short-term results,” BusinessInsider.com, April 14, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-fink-letter-to-ceos-2015-4.

64. S. Denning, “How CEOs Became Takers, Not Makers”; S. Denning, “From CEO Takers to CEO Makers,” Forbes.com, August 20, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/08/20/from-ceo-takers-to-ceo-makers-the-great-transformation/; S. Denning, “The Economist: Blue Chips Are Addicted to Corporate Cocaine,” Forbes.com, September 19, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/09/9/the-economist-blue-chips-are-addicted-to-corporate-cocaine/.

CHAPTER 9

1. “Corporate cocaine: Companies are spending record amounts on buying back their own shares. Investors should be worried,” The Economist, September 13, 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21616950-companies-are-spending-record-amounts-buying-back-their-own-shares-investors-should-be; “The repurchase revolution: Companies have been gobbling up their own shares at an exceptional rate: there are good reasons,” The Economist, September 12, 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/business/21616968-companies-have-been-gobbling-up-their-own-shares-exceptional-rate-there-are-good-reasons.

2. W. Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review, September 2014.

3. S. Denning, “The Economist, Blue Chips Are Addicted to Corporate Cocaine,” Forbes.com, April 19, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/09/19/the-economist-blue-chips-are-addicted-to-corporate-cocaine/; K. Brettell, D. Gaffen, and D. Rohde, “The Cannibalized Company: How the Cult of Shareholder Value Has Reshaped Corporate America; A Special Report,” Reuters, November 16, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-buybacks-cannibalized; J. Plender, “Blowing the Whistle on Buybacks and Value Destruction,” Financial Times, March 1, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/0b71ca32-df0b-11e5-b67f-a61732c1d025; S. Denning, “The Best Management Article of 2014,” Forbes.com, March 26, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/03/26/the-best-management-article-of-2014/.

4. W. Lazonick, “How Stock Buybacks Make Americans Vulnerable to Globalization,” Working Paper, East-West Center Workshop on Mega-Regionalism: New Challenges for Trade and Innovation, March 11, 2016, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2745387.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Plender, “Blowing the Whistle on Buybacks and Value Destruction.” By the first quarter of 2017, the stock market had soared without foundation to such extravagant highs that even corporate boards began to show some moderation in the rush to extract value; see “Market Too Frothy for Buybacks: CFOs and Boards,” Seeking Alpha, May 2, 2017, https://seekingalpha.com/article/4067753-market-frothy-buybacks-cfos-boards.

9. Lazonick, “How Stock Buybacks Make Americans Vulnerable to Globalization.”

10. Jeff Cox, “This ‘investor obsession’ during the bull market is falling out of fashion,” CNBC, May 2, 2017, http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/01/buyback-obsession-during-the-bull-market-is-falling-out-of-fashion.html.

11. J. Bezos: “Letter to Amazon Shareholders,” 1997, http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/97/97664/reports/Shareholderletter97.pdf; S. Denning, “How Not to Reclaim the World’s Dumbest Idea,” Forbes.com, August 31, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/08/31/hbr-how-not-to-reclaim-the-worlds-dumbest-idea/.

12. Bezos, “Letter to Amazon Shareholders.”

13. A. Boynton, “Unilever’s Paul Polman: CEOs Can’t Be Slaves to Shareholders,” July 20, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/andyboynton/2015/07/20/unilevers-paul-polman-ceos-cant-be-slaves-to-shareholders/.

14. S. Denning, “Should Wall Street Reward Adobe’s Failing Profits,” Forbes.com, March 28, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/28/should-wall-street-reward-adobes-falling-profits/.

15. S. Denning, “Shift Index 2016: Why Can’t Firms Innovate?,” Forbes.com, December 15, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/12/15/shift-index-2016-shows-continuing-decline-in-performance-of-us-firms/.

CHAPTER 10

1. J. McManus, “The Risk of Too Much Cost Focus: Saving on expense may be an upside of tech innovation and investment, but the real goal should be creating value, not merely increasing efficiency,” BuilderOnLine, April 2, 2017, http://www.builderonline.com/builder-100/strategy/the-risk-of-too-much-cost-focus_o.

2. R. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4, no. 16 (November 1937): 386–405, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-03351937.tb00002.x/abstract.

3. A. Cockcroft, “Evolution of Business Logic from Monoliths Through Microservices to Functions,” February 16, 2017, https://read.acloud.guru/evolution-of-business-logic-from-monoliths-through-microser-vices-to-functions-ff464b95a44d. “In the past, costs were high and efficiency concerns dominated, with high time to value regarded as the normal state of affairs. . . . When costs dominate, that’s where the focus is, but as costs reduce and software impact increases, the focus flips towards getting the return earlier.”

4. C. M. Christensen, J. H. Grossman, and J. Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2008).

5. Ibid., 263.

6. Ibid., 265.

7. S. Denning, “Why Amazon Can’t Make a Kindle in the USA,” Forbes.com, August 17, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/08/17/why-amazon-cant-make-a-kindle-in-the-usa/.

8. P. F. Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: HarperCollins, 1954), 65. “Company after company is working on the definition of the key areas, on thinking through what should be measured and on fashioning the tools of measurement. Within a few years our knowledge of what to measure and our ability to do so should therefore be greatly increased.” See also P. Drucker and R. Wartzman, The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society and Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2010), 62. Overall, being “data-informed” may be better approach than being “data-driven”; see the earlier discussion in Chapter 5.

9. “Total Cost of Ownership Estimator,” Reshoring Initiative, http://www.reshorenow.org/TCO_Estimator.cfm.

10. H. Moser conversation with S. Denning, “What Went Wrong at Boeing?,” Forbes.com, January 17, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/01/17/the-boeing-debacle-seven-lessons-every-ceo-must-learn/. See also “Offshoring: What’s the Total Cost of Ownership?,” Quality Digest, September 21, 2011, https://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/quality-insider-article/offshoring-what-s-total-cost-ownership.html.

11. Denning, “What Went Wrong at Boeing.”

12. G. P. Pisano and W. C. Shih, “Restoring American Competitiveness,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2009, https://hbr.org/2009/07/restoring-american-competitiveness.

13. Ibid. The components of a Kindle are manufactured in Asia. The flex circuit connectors, the highly polished injection-molded case, the controller board, and the lithium polymer battery are made in China. The electrophoretic display is made in Taiwan. The wireless card is made in South Korea.

14. The list of sectors already lost includes: “fabless chips; compact fluorescent lighting; LCDs for monitors, TVs, and handheld devices like mobile phones; electrophoretic displays; lithium ion, lithium polymer, and NiMH batteries; advanced rechargeable batteries for hybrid vehicles; crystalline and polycrystalline silicon solar cells, inverters, and power semiconductors for solar panels; desktop, notebook, and netbook PCs; low-end servers; hard-disk drives; consumer networking gear such as routers, access points, and home set-top boxes; advanced composite [materials] used in sporting goods and other consumer gear; advanced ceramics and integrated circuit packaging.”

15. C. Fishman, “The Insourcing Boom,” The Atlantic, December 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-insourcing-boom/309166/.

16. Ibid. See also S. Denning, “Why Apple and GE Are Bringing Back Manufacturing,” Forbes.com, December 7, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/12/07/why-apple-and-ge-are-bringing-manufacturing-back/.

17. In 2012, the China-made GeoSpring retailed for $1,599. The Louisville-made GeoSpring retails for $1,299 (Fishman, “The Insourcing Boom”). By 2015, GE had raised the price to $1,900, according to pricing data at the GE Appliances website (http://products.geappliances.com/appliance/dealer-locations/GEH80DFEJSR; http://www.geappliances.com/ge/heat-pump-hot-water-heater.htm).

18. Fishman, “The Insourcing Boom.”

19. Ibid.

20. In June 2016, GE announced that it was selling its appliance division to Haier, the world’s leading appliance manufacturer, which is based in Qingdao, China. A. C. Thompson, “It’s Official: GE Appliances Belongs to Haier,” CNET, June 6, 2016, https://www.cnet.com/news/its-official-ge-appliances-belongs-to-haier/.

21. J. Freeman et al., “Theory of Constraints and Throughput Accounting,” Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) Topic Gateway Series No. 26, March 2007, http://www.cimaglobal.com/Documents/ImportedDocuments/26_Theory_of_Constraints_and_Throughput_Accounting.pdf.

CHAPTER 11

1. J. Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey v. 14; 1939-1941 (Amsterdam Netherlands: Pergamon Media/Elsevier, 2015), 107.

2. P. Gorski, “Michael Porter Is Bankrupt AND the Framework of a Blindfolded Chimpanzee,” Gorski Ventures News, November 13, 2012, http://www.gorskiventures.com/michael-porter-is-bankrupt-and-the-framework-of-blindfolded-chimpanzee/.

3. Ibid. Peter Gorski suggested that “even a blindfolded chimpanzee throwing darts at the Porter Five Forces framework can select a business strategy that performs as well as that prescribed by Dr. Porter and other high-paid strategy consultants.” See also S. Denning, “What Killed Michael Porter’s Monitor Group? The One Force That Really Matters,” Forbes.com, November 20, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/11/20/what-killed-michael-porters-monitor-group-the-one-force-that-really-matters/; S. Denning, “Even Monitor Didn’t Believe in the Five Forces,” Forbes.com, November 24, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/11/24/even-monitor-didnt-believe-in-the-five-forces/; S. Denning, “It’s Official: The End of Competitive Advantage,” Forbes.com, June 2, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/02/its-official-the-end-of-competitive-advantage/. See also the counter-critique from the strategy faculty at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University: J. Love, “The End of Strategy? Our Faculty Discusses,” January 7, 2013, https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/blogs/entry/the_end_of_strategy_our_faculty_discusses.

4. M. E. Porter, Competitive Strategy (New York: Free Press, 1980). The book was voted the ninth most influential management book of the twentieth century in a poll of the Fellows of the Academy of Management.

5. M. Stewart, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009), 160. Stewart is a consulting insider, and his book is enlightening, but misleadingly titled.

6. Ibid., 168.

7. J. Magretta, Understanding Michael Porter (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2012), 8.

8. Stewart, The Management Myth, 207.

9. C. von Clausewitz, On War, published posthumously in 1832; L. Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2013), 87.

10. H. G. von Moltke, Militarische Werke, vol. 2, part 2. Reproduced in D. J. Hughes, ed., Moltke on the Art of War: selected writings (New York: Presidio Press, 1993), 45.

11. Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces, Field Manual No. 6-0, August 2003.

12. Conceptually, detailed command and mission command reflect two different approaches to dealing with uncertainty. Detailed command is data-based and information-focused. It aims to reduce uncertainty at the higher echelons by collecting more and better data and increasing the information processing capability. It trades off speed of action for completeness of information. Mission command, by contrast, is action-oriented. It aims at reducing uncertainty evenly throughout the organization. Leaders educate their organizations to codevelop a widely understood strategic vision and manage a set of strategic initiatives as part of normal operations. They delegate authority for decision making to those levels that can acquire and process information and move into action quickly without waiting for detailed orders. The process makes full use of the organization’s talent. See Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces, para. 1–50.

13. A. Murray, “The End of Management,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2010, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704476104575439723695579664.

14. M. Porter, “How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, March 1979, https://hbr.org/1979/03/how-competitive-forces-shape-strategy/ar/1, and republished as “The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, January 2008, https://hbr.org/2008/01/the-five-competitive-forces-that-shape-strategy.

15. In the 2008 version, the sentence has only been slightly amended to read: “In essence, the job of the strategist is to understand and cope with competition.”

16. Porter, “How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy.” In the 2008 republished version of the original article, the language is somewhat modified: “Understanding the competitive forces, and their underlying causes, reveals the roots of an industry’s current profitability while providing a framework for anticipating and influencing competition and profitability over time.” Thus “the ultimate profit potential” has been modified to become “the roots of an industry’s current profitability,” and “the framework for anticipating influencing . . . profitability over time.” The problem here is that the thinking is still the same. An industry’s current profitability is a very poor framework for anticipating future profitability, given massive disruptive innovation now under way across all sectors. In any event, there is no acknowledgement of the change in thinking. The republished article is presented as embodying the “timeless truths” of Porter’s thinking.

17. Magretta, Understanding Michael Porter, 31.

18. Stewart, The Management Myth, 183.

19. Ibid., 182.

20. Ibid., 183.

21. J.B. Quinn, Strategies for change: Logical incrementalism (Home-wood, IL: R.D. Irwin, 1980), 122.

22. Denning, “Even Monitor Didn’t Believe in the Five Forces”; see also the Kellogg School of Management’s counter-critique by Love, “The End of Strategy? Our Faculty Discusses.”

23. The idea that strategy is innovation was discussed in Gary Hamel, “Strategy as Revolution,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 1996, https://hbr.org/1996/07/strategy-as-revolution.

CHAPTER 12

1. T. Herzl, Old New Land (Leipzig: Seemann Nachf, 1902), 296: “But if you do not wish it, all this that I have related to you is and will remain a dream.” The simplified, more positive version of the phrase, “If you will it, it is no dream,” became a popular slogan of the Zionist movement—the striving for a Jewish National Home in Israel.

2. S. Denning, “Coding: Agile and Scrum Go Mainstream,” Forbes.com, June 14, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/06/14/coding-agile-scrum-go-mainstream/.

3. D. K. Rigby, J. Sutherland, and H. Takeuchi, “Embracing Agile,” Harvard Business Review, April 2016; S. Denning, “HBR’s Embrace of Agile,” Forbes.com, April 21, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/04/21/hbrs-embrace-of-agile/; K. Brettell, D. Gaffen, and D. Rohde, “The Cannibalized Company,” Reuters, November 16, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-buybacks-cannibalized/; S. Denning, “How Corporate America Is Cannibalizing Itself,” Forbes.com, November 18, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/11/18/how-corporate-america-is-cannibalizing-itself/; S. Denning, “Financial Times Slams Share Buybacks,” Forbes.com, March 22, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/03/22/financial-times-slams-share-buybacks/; S. Denning, “Resisting the Lure of Short-Termism,” Forbes.com, January 8, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/01/08/resisting-the-lure-of-short-termism-how-to-achieve-long-term-growth/.

4. J. Cox, “This ‘Investor Obsession’ During the Bull Market Is Falling Out of Fashion,” CNBC, May 1, 2017, http://www.cnbc.com/201705/01/buyback-obsession-during-the-bull-market-is-falling-out-of-fashion.html.

5. Chapter 12 builds on Carlota Perez’s brilliant book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2003). As W. Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico wrote: “Before I read this book I thought that the history of technology was—to borrow Churchill’s phrase—merely ‘one damned thing after another.’ Not so. Carlota Perez shows us that historically technological revolutions arrive with remarkable regularity, and that economies react to them in predictable phases.” See also S. Denning, “Understanding Disruption: Insights from the History of Business,” Forbes.com, June 24, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/06/24/understanding-disruption-insights-from-the-history-of-business/.

6. This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, although there is no documented proof of that. For a further investigation of the provenance of this adage, see “History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes,” Quote Investigator, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/.

7. See for example Nazi Germany, Russia, and the Soviet Union.

8. C. Perez, “The double bubble at the turn of the Century: Technological roots and structural implications,” Centre for Financial Analysis & Policy, Judge Business School, Cambridge University, U.K., CFAP/CERF Working Paper No. 31: 22.

9. F. Partnoy and J. Eisinger, “What’s Inside America’s Banks?,” The Atlantic, January/February 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/whats-inside-americas-banks/309196/.

10. S. Denning, “Lest We Forget: Why We Had a Financial Crisis,” Forbes.com, November 22, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/22/5086/.

11. The defeat of the powerful U.S. chemical companies who opposed the regulation of pesticides in the 1960s is an interesting illustration of how a combination of knowledge and courage can overcome money. See Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1962).

12. These are examples of “big ideas” presented at a recent international TED conference. See C. Itkowitz, “Prioritizing These Three Things Will Improve Your Life—and Maybe Even Save It,” Washington Post, April 28, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2017/04/28/prioritizing-these-three-things-will-improve-your-life-and-maybe-even-save-it/.

13. A. Cockcroft, “Evolution of Business Logic from Monoliths Through Microservices to Functions,” A Cloud Guru, February 16, 2017, https://read.acloud.guru/evolution-of-business-logic-from-monoliths-through-microservices-to-functions-ff464b95a44d.

14. Ibid.

15. Quoted in Daniel Altman, “Managing Globalization: Q & A with Joseph Stiglitz,” International Herald Tribune, October 11, 2006. See also J. Schlefer, “There Is No Invisible Hand,” Harvard Business Review, April 2004, https://hbr.org/2012/04/there-is-no-invisible-hand; T. Worstall, “The Death of Macroeconomics: There Is No Invisible Hand,” Forbes.com, April 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/imworstall/2012/04/12/the-death-of-macroeconomics-there-is-no-invisible-hand/.

16. Rigby, Sutherland, and Takeuchi, “Embracing Agile”; Denning, “HBR’s Embrace of Agile.”

17. D. Brooks, “This Age of Wonkery,” New York Times, April 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/opinion/this-age-of-wonkery.html.

18. Under the courageous thought leadership of its editor, Robert Randall, Strategy & Leadership journal (http://www.emeraldinsight.com/loi/sl -- subscription required) has published more than thirty articles on Agile management since 2010.

19. “The true elite of modern societies is composed of engineers, mechanics, and artisans—masters of reality, not big thinkers.” A. Gopnik, “Are Liberals on the Wrong Side of History?,” The New Yorker, March 20, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/are-liberals-on-the-wrong-side-of-history.

20. The first few decades of the fifteenth century is seen by some critics as a moment in history when civilization was at a peak, a Renaissance of the human spirit. See K. Clark, Civilization (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). Like today, there was much to criticize. Crass materialism. A love of making money. Concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Financial meltdowns. Political chicanery. Environmental disasters. Raucous, uncouth marketplaces occupied by self-seeking bankers, merchants, and traders. Yet there was also much to admire. Among the greatest achievements was that things were kept on a human scale. Some are disappointed when they visit the famous beginnings of Renaissance architecture, like the Pazzi Chapel in Florence or the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo, because they seem so small. “They don’t try to impress us or crush us by size and weight, as all God-directed architecture does. Everything is adjusted to the scale of reasonable human necessity. They are intended to make each individual more conscious of his powers, as a complete moral and intellectual being. They are an assertion of the dignity of man” (Civilization, 64). They have the qualities of a mathematical theorem: “clarity, economy, elegance.”