On a bright and sunny morning, Nancy Bauer had a clear sense that her new job was going to change the world. She was hired to orchestrate agile and lean transformation for a well-established, almost-150-year-old company that owned an unprecedented data set paired with powerful analytics and a well-packaged set of products and services in its domain of business information. The company recently recruited strong leadership who exhibited transformation thinking and new mentality, and believed in the power of enterprise-level lean agility. For the purpose of this story, I will refer to this enterprise as a Big Data Company, or simply BDC.

At her job interview a month prior, Nancy was impressed by the level of openness and lean agile thinking she observed while talking to multiple future colleagues in a half-day interview. In her mind, the caliber of interviewers reflected the importance that the company was placing on its transformation, and this interview was a clear indication of the leadership support of agility, the open mind of company’s leadership, and the company’s collaborative atmosphere. In addition to her future boss, who ran a global Project Management Office organization combining software delivery lifecycle (SDLC) management tooling, portfolio management, and the future agile coaching organization that Nancy was supposed to form and lead with multiple future colleagues, Nancy was interviewed by the Chief of Staff to the CEO as well as one of the senior leaders within its IT organization. This showed the company’s commitment to its transformation.

All of the interviews Nancy had were less job interviews and more of conversations between like-minded people who understood the organizational tendencies of the changing world and wanted to make a positive difference in delivering products and services that delighted the customers by being innovative, tuned to customer needs, and delivered with quality, flexibility, and speed.

From the business perspective, though, the company was perceived by the media as a low-growth legacy giant, and there was a lot of pressure on the leadership to turn the ship around.

This mix of cultural, staffing, technical, and managerial challenges coming from the legacy environment did not scare Nancy. On the contrary, her professional motto was all about turning challenges into opportunities. In her mind, every challenge described above gave her a chance to influence the organization and get people excited about agile and lean by being able to orchestrate faster, more predictable, and collaborative delivery; by empowering team-level decision making; by motivating employees through self-organization and teamwork; by building modern skillsets and promoting collaborative goal-driven behaviors; by streamlining processes and giving people the tools they need to provide full visibility, alignment, and drive measurable results throughout the organization. There were numerous opportunities to motivate employees, delight customers, and turn the company’s reputation around to be perceived as an innovator in lean-agile thinking and business agility.

These were the thoughts that occupied Nancy’s mind as she took the long drive to work on her first day of the job. She already felt empowered and well supported. Even though her job had not started yet, she spent the last two weeks actively interviewing agile coaches for her soon-to-be-formed team, in close collaboration with the company’s recruiting department. Being a veteran agile coach who walked a long road from a developer, systems analyst, and Scrum Master to an enterprise-level lean and agile coach, with multiple agile transformations under her belt, Nancy felt that she was well equipped to make this agile implementation a huge success. All the prerequisites were in place: solid business, powerful legacy, dedicated employees, strong leadership. Well, what could potentially go wrong? {Reflect on Nancy’s plan below- how does it fit with section 2 approach to a lean transformation?}

Being a lean agile transformation veteran, Nancy was impressed with the caliber of the company’s leadership and their openness to innovation. Nancy started by establishing strong relationships with each of them. She introduced herself to each of the leaders and spoke with them about their business goals and challenges (“What keeps you up at night?”) and aligned her vision for the enterprise-level agile rollout with their thoughts, challenges, and long-term objectives.

As a result of this analysis, Nancy set up individual regular meetings with Keith, Ruth, Amy, and one of Rose’s leaders, ranging from bi-weekly to monthly. She also agreed on the monthly updates as part of the CEO staff meetings for the first six months of the lean agile transformation. The first update was supposed to be the lean agile rollout roadmap that she would create based on their inputs and her first month with the company. This part went smoothly; Nancy felt that there was a strong sense of urgency and craving for a positive change with a powerful leading coalition being formed to promote the change. Nancy was already considering compressing her original roadmap given that the organization was so well aligned, positive, and open-minded.

It was not all that rosy and uneventful, though. In the morning of her first day at the job, Nancy’s manager, Mario, who has been extremely welcoming and supportive throughout the interviewing and onboarding process, set up a two-hour meeting to present her with her objectives for the first week, first months, and the first quarter. Even though they had multiple conversations about the goals of business agility and organizational objectives prior to Nancy joining BDC, and the direction of these objectives did not come as a surprise to her, the top-down nature of this two-hour meeting with her immediate manager and a predefined set of objectives presented to her came as a surprise. In addition, Mario, who also led the enterprise Project Management Organization, set up daily meetings with her during the first week, expecting a daily progress report. Nancy was not sure at that point whether it was a sign of support or micromanagement, and decided to go with the flow. She needed as much support as she could get with the scope of changes she was about to introduce into the organization.

Nancy was presented with the list of objectives but she felt that she needed to ask some questions and provide feedback instead of blindly committing to them. While responding to this list of objectives, Nancy told Mario that some of the metrics-based targets were unrealistic, such as 30%+ velocity increase for three teams within three months. Given that she was at a time a sole person with a goal of establishing a lean agile practice within a global company from scratch including establishing vision, creating and getting buy-in for a roadmap, budget management, recruiting, and creating early successes by training people on the ground while serving as a Scrum Master for the first pilot teams until they become self-sustainable, Nancy felt that the objectives had to be revisited.

She shared with Mario that the metrics has to be meaningful and address organizational objectives. She also advocated that they had to baseline data before creating any targets. Overall, she believed that the transformation leaders should be trusted with defining initial pace, which they would then complement with meaningful metrics, such as the number and quality of features delivered to the customer, or customer satisfaction via NPS score, surveys, or business metrics (ROI, P&L, etc.)

The two of them had these conversations over the first week of Nancy’s employment and decided to “park it” until the first set of measurable data was available. Both Nancy and Mario seemed to be comfortable with this approach. The only expectation, she was not comfortable with, based on her prior experience as a coach, was to “go faster.” She shared with Mario how detrimental unrealistic expectations were as related to lean agile transformations, which are essentially “people business” much more than IT business, and the people business is not something that you can rush. Mario seemed to be supportive of this approach.

In addition, Nancy found out that Ruth had a strong lean experience at her prior company with a specific well-known productivity framework that was implemented there. Ruth implemented lean practices on the operational side, and she wanted Nancy to do the same. This gave Nancy, who came to BDC from a Chief Operating Officer role at a midsize consulting company, an opportunity to dive deeper into BDC operations. At that point, Nancy felt that she could change her original approach to transforming BDC culture: instead of starting a lean agile transformation from IT, she had a rare opportunity to approach this as an agile and lean transformation to address company needs, and start it as an enterprise-level transformation from the very beginning. This later proved to be a powerful first step, supported by the CEO and recognized on the ground.

As a Week 1 (Discovery Week) deliverable, Nancy handed her manager a stakeholder map with all the stakeholders she identified, their areas of responsibility and influence, and their role in the future lean agile transformation. Linked to this spreadsheet, she also had a list of their individual pain points and objectives, as well as their individual experience with agile and lean. This simple template proved to be a powerful tool as it helped Nancy visualize the biggest supporters and detractors of the agile transformation, and develop strategies of supporting the goals of the first group and educating the second.

Week 2. Showing Early Results. The second step in Nancy’s roadmap was to show early successes. This was imperative for gaining trust with leadership and having them support the transformation.

For that, she collaborated with Mario to identify the most challenged and yet strategically important business teams with which she could start coaching. It turned out that there were several groups within the company who heard about an agile coach joining the organization and were interested in adopting lean agile methods. Nancy selected to start with a large team that was supporting a new compliance product. This was a 23-person highly distributed team with two primary clusters of team members in New Jersey and in Bangalore, India. There was lack of alignment, communication challenges, limited visibility into deliverables and related milestones, and a huge product backlog with hundreds of bugs and insurmountable technical debt. The timelines were business-driven and excluded input from technology teams, which resulted in employee burn-out and significant technical debt. It was an emotionally charged environment of hardworking and knowledgeable people, and it presented an immediate opportunity for Nancy.

The prerequisites for success were all there: high visibility, subject matter expertise, and urgency for change since it was team members who reached out to her directly asking for lean agile coaching. There were some team members who had prior Scrum or Kanban experience. There was strong IT leadership and a knowledgeable product SME on the team. There were major challenges visible at the top of this organization that had to be immediately addressed. Product leadership was forward-looking and supportive. After two initial conversations and observations, Nancy made a decision to designate this team as a pilot lean agile team and measure their progress as a case for transformation in order to start scaling, get budget approvals, and move forward with global changes with this highly distributed organization. If she succeeded with this team, it would show the power of agility.

Nancy shared this approach with the leaders identified during Week 1, and they were highly supportive, and so was Mario. The only concern was that her manager requested that she schedule training for the same week so that she could prove her own value to the organization since she had been there for almost two weeks. Nancy used this opportunity to educate her manager on industry studies and expectations for an enterprise-level transformation and relevant timelines, but Mario was firm: Nancy had to move faster and start showing measurable outcomes as soon as possible.

This was the start of an unsustainable pace for Nancy. She stayed up for two nights and created a two-day agile training curriculum, similar to the content of a standard Certified Scrum Master class. It was a solid basic course, and she intended to iterate on it with her future team, making it more company-specific and polished as she moved forward.

Nancy was also busy recruiting. This was another area where she and her manager disagreed on the “go faster” approach. Mario felt that they needed to hire the coaching team within a month or two; otherwise he felt that they risked losing budget. Nancy felt that the priority should be on hiring people with the right mindset and relevant experience. Luckily, the first Agile Coach to hire was quickly identified. He was knowledgeable and experienced, and he immediately accepted the offer and was excited to start in two weeks. The search continued for two other open positions. One was an agile coaching position with DevOps experience and a strong technical background. The other was for a lean Six Sigma professional to address the operational needs of the organization.

Meanwhile Nancy’s first agile training was a big success. The team that was previously demotivated by unrealistic expectations and lack of self-organization was excited about lean agile values and principles of self-organization and value-driven culture. The interactive nature of the training that Nancy developed allowed team members in business and technology to spend time together and get to know each other as partners. In addition, Nancy came up with a concept of internal certification and developed an online test using one of the sophisticated testing tools so that test takers could see custom grading based on their responses, get advice on the topics of opportunity, and retake the test based on the areas they originally struggled with. The test was neither mandatory nor easy but every single person who attended Nancy’s training eventually passed it (some trainees had to take it two or three times, but given the reasonably sized and algorithm-driven question bank each time they got new set of questions, so the test was meaningful and never boring). Each person who passed the test received a completion certificate signed by Nancy.

In a weekly IT leadership meeting during the following week, Nancy was pleasantly surprised to receive kudos from both the IT and business leaders of this product team, especially since she herself nominated this team for an internal leadership award for their passion and enthusiasm in the lean agile transition.

During week 2, Nancy continued meeting with the key stakeholders of the company. In one of the meetings, she was introduced to Jack Tulipanin, BDC’s Chief Security Officer. Jack had a prior successful startup experience and excelled in building forward-looking, high-performance organizations. Thus it was no surprise that BDC security department was an agile and lean organization of 100 individuals, a fairly lean number for a big data company with regulated data responsibilities. Jack asked Nancy to coach his operations teams and to provide advanced training and Q&A session to his leadership, which she started next day. Jack continued to be a strong partner for Nancy going forward, and his organization continued to perform strongly and was well-known as such across the company. Jack and Nancy were well aligned on the agile and lean journey.

Month 1. Fast forward to the end of the month. The lean agile transformation progressed rapidly. The Lean Agile Coach joined her team and the search continued for two other open agile and two lean coaching positions. Nancy started a lean agile community of practice (CoP) and was running weekly office hours and coaching sessions with an increasing demand. She and other agilists were in demand as trainers and coaches, and she was invited to speak in front of multiple groups within the organization. The newly joined coach and Nancy developed multiple training curricula for Scrum Masters and Product Owners, and a value-based introductory course for leaders; they blogged, met with people, traveled to multiple company locations. Everywhere there were great conversations, learnings, and outcomes. With that, the lean agile rollout model matured.

At the end of her first month with BDC, Nancy was invited to speak at a global technology town hall about agile and lean transformation, along with the company’s CTO. The town hall happened at the end of her second month at the company. In her presentation, Nancy was able to use several dozen examples of the success of early transformation initiatives at BDC globally, from the compliance product team’s agile transformation to the vendor onboarding cycle time reduction achieved as part of the lean pilot. The two compliance teams were able to reduce their time to production from three months to a single month; both teams deployed to production every sprint and were capable of deploying even more frequently if required by the business.

A 10% cycle time reduction was achieved by the lean operations team (they started using the term “lean pilots” for these lean-agile mini-projects). After her presentations, Nancy received hundreds of positive responses and requests for coaching, operational support, training, and requests to join her team from multiple international BDC locations (India, London, Ireland, Texas, and California).

Leadership was on board, early successes were established and visible, there was a noticeable budget allocated, and senior management was supportive of the transformation. The early goal of leadership support was achieved in a short time. Nancy felt proud of the success she and her mini-team were able to achieve within a multi-thousand-people company over such a short period of time and was ready to scale the transformation.

Six months. Over the next six months, the Lean Agile Transformation team proved once and again that they could deliver. By that time, the team had grown to 10 members, and the agile teams and lean pilots they were coaching achieved consistent measurable success. Not all of them were successful; one of the early lean pilots aiming to improve global operations efficiency was closed due to lack of sponsor engagement and team member availability. In the overwhelming majority, though, the leadership team as well as practitioners on the ground saw the advantages of agile and lean transformations. They were talking about agile and lean culture spreading far outside IT.

Nancy was excited about the early success and pleasantly overwhelmed with leadership alignment, and yet there were several challenges that kept her up at night.

1. Supply vs. Demand : Demand for agile and lean coaching services significantly exceeded their capacity, which created pressure on coaches to provide services and on her to hire fast.

Nancy tried several approaches to resolve this issue. Her coaching team operated as a Scrum team, so they were able to prioritize their work and commit to a sprint boundary. She spent almost 30% of her time partnering with the internal recruiting organization to do hiring. Internal recruiting did not provide any support for hiring consultants, so Nancy had to engage vendor partners herself and manage the hiring pipeline for her three more open positions at the same time. She and her small team reviewed multiple resumes daily, coordinated the interview process using a Kanban board, and managed communications with multiple vendors. This in turn affected their velocity.

For Nancy personally, these activities negatively affected her work-life balance as well. In the end of six months, on her long-awaited week-long vacation in Hawaii, she had to wake up at 3 a.m. every morning to coordinate hiring activities and interview candidates in the East Coast to share the load with the rest of her team. Agile coaches started taking evening interviews with candidates, but the hiring process went slowly, given the allocated budget, enterprise-level practices, and coaching requirements, preferences for full-time internal coaches, out-of-city location of BDC headquarters which was accessible by car only, and overall high bar for the coaches they were hiring.

On top of these challenges, Mario was pushing Nancy to hire the team as soon as possible, threatening to cut her team’s budget if hiring did not happen fast enough. He met with Nancy on a weekly basis, requesting constant updates on how many people were interviewed, the outcome of each interview, and blaming her for not being able to hire fast enough. He shared that Keith was extremely upset with the speed of her hiring process and expected her to move faster. This added stress to an already unsustainable pace. Within a month, Nancy was able to hire two lean Six Sigma practitioners with agile expertise for the lean pilots, but the search for enterprise coaches stalled. Nancy asked for additional support from the recruiting team with whom she was able to develop a close partnership, and she received it, but the hiring process was not moving forward as fast as Mario expected.

These hiring activities were happening on top of all another coaching, training, reporting, and communication activities that the team was actively performing. Nancy was acting as a playing coach, staff manager, and a product owner for agile transformation collaborating with other coaches in all agile coaching and lean pilot activities, resolving escalations, removing organizational level impediments, providing hands-on training, and maintaining reporting and communication with leadership. Nancy offered an Agile Leader title to one of her agile coaches, hoping that he would take over the agile coaching practice, but he was not interested. The hiring quest continued.

2. “Not fast enough:” Since Nancy’s second month with BDS, Mario was constantly sharing with Nancy that Keith was upset that the lean agile transformation was not moving fast enough and that he felt Nancy was slowing down in the transformation process. Nancy did not get this feedback from Keith directly, but she trusted Mario, who reported to Keith and was meeting with him every week for their one-on-one. This intensity coming from Mario seemed unfair to Nancy. She questioned this presumed slowness to Mario, who responded by accusing her of not being receptive to feedback, so she made the decision to ignore the noise and “do the right thing.”

While Nancy’s motivation was down after her meetings with Mario, it was the people and teams on the ground that made her work worthwhile. She could see the impact, the positive feedback that she and other coaches were receiving from the teams and business stakeholders, the awards she and her team were nominated for–all of it was encouraging. The metrics collected for all the objectives of lean agile transformation–cycle time reduction, business impact, quality, employee satisfaction–were exceeding the objectives established during her first month at BDC.

3. Hiring block: In order to meet rapid hiring requirements, Nancy did several things: she partnered with her peers in Mario’s team to initiate an agile and lean meetup, which eventually brought multiple strong employees to the company. The BDC recruiting team became yet again a strong partner in getting this event off the ground. She also started looking for an agile transformation vendor and initiated an RFP to several agile consulting companies. She received proposals from three companies. The proposals were all thoughtful and well presented, but the three-month budget for each of those consultancies was higher than her annual agile transformation budget. Nancy still found two proposals out of three reasonable and spoke with Mario, who was not supportive of the high spend.

Finally, Nancy reached out to her extended network and was able to identify a candidate who was an active member of the agile community and was well-versed in enterprise-level lean agile practices. This candidate passed all four interviews with carefully selected interviewers of different competencies with a high rating. There were some small red flags; one was that he interviewed with Nancy’s team while having a proposal from a different company. On the day of the interview, this coach issued an ultimatum, basically saying that he needed a same-day offer from BDC or he would join the other company. Mario, who also interviewed this coach, was supportive; by the end of the interview day, the paperwork was ready to go, but the coach informed Nancy that he already took the offer from the other company. Two months later, he contacted Nancy to share that his role in a new company was limited to training, which was not interesting for him professionally, so he wanted to join BDC, which he did two weeks later after Nancy and Mario prioritized his paperwork with full support from the recruiting team. It is hard to say why they ignored the obvious red flags and thus this new enterprise agile coach joined the team.

One year. About a year into the transformation, Nancy’s Scrum-based approach to running a lean agile coaching team started failing. As a Product Owner, she had to prioritize work with her team. Since demand for coaching exceeded supply, she was personally responsible for notifying those whose requests were deprioritized or scheduled for subsequent sprints, with decisions made by Keith and Mario based on organizational needs. Nancy communicated these decisions to requestors. Most of these conversations went well but few of the requestors were unhappy with the prioritization decisions and felt that Nancy’s team was unsupportive.

When Nancy found out about this perception, she presented the list of priorities to every leader for their input. She also reached out to Mario for support, and he promised to speak with the stakeholders who were dissatisfied to explain limited bandwidth of the coaching team. Surprisingly, Mario returned back to her and told her that stakeholder satisfaction was her primary responsibility and she had to figure out how to keep her stakeholders happy. He indicated that she had to figure this out or there would be consequences to her job.

Stunned, Nancy did once again the only thing she could think of to meet the demand: she increased her own work time, working 60-70 hours a week. This also meant additional load on the team of coaches and less time for her to support them, which had a negative effect on team morale.

Finally, the aforementioned new agile coach, the one who had the offer from a different employer, turned out to be a mistake. This coach, while well-educated and knowledgeable about agile practices, was negative and constantly complained: other coaches were unsupportive, the teams he coached exhibited old school thinking, and the technology was outdated. Coaching and supporting him, Nancy overlooked the toxic influence this well-versed, friendly, and influential individual had on the rest of the team.

He approached team members with meaningful questions: “Why do we need to collect metrics? Isn’t it a sign of distrust? Why would anyone be interested in the measurable results or team members’ feedback if there is trust in their coaching abilities? Why is the CTO making decisions? Why do we need a manager on a coaching team? Isn’t agile all about self-organization? Why are we expected to drive results? We should be coaches, not practitioners.” This approach turned out to be disruptive. Two of the coaches supported the “no metrics, no results” approach, and the team of coaches started drifting apart.

Initially, this coach was hired primarily because of his development background; however, after he provided agile training to the DevOps team, they found it confusing and asked Nancy for another coach on her team to support them. After he started coaching a large program, they requested another coach with a more positive attitude. His peers found his behavior disrespectful and arrogant. Nancy asked this coach whether he would like to move to a single team. After a short time with this team, the coach himself asked to take him off the team because they were not receptive to his coaching. Those instances created reputational risk for the whole team and decreased morale.

The other challenge was OKR-driven mentality. When I discussed objectives and key results in Section 1, I indicated that objectives and key results are an effective alignment tool at the enterprise level but are sometimes misused as a performance management tool. This happened at BDC. While the company was excited about OKR implementation, without proper coaching, it did not go well. Mario was an example of a manager who took time to rewrite OKRs that the coaching team came up with and presented them to the team “for their feedback.” The feedback session ended up in a heated conversation. Confronted by the coaches, Mario suggested that they “go with the flow.” The next day he told Nancy that she and her team need to meet the OKRs; otherwise, he would let her and “her coaches” go. Stunned, Nancy worked around the clock to meet the objectives set by her manager and minimize the damage to her team.

In the midst of these challenges, Nancy’s Transformation Team was growing and included experienced as well as junior coaches, lean startup practitioners, change managers, and innovation leaders. Numerous teams were transitioning to agile, multiple organizational impediments were solved, and hundreds of people were trained. Their work was impacting more and more people within the organization, reaching their second-year business agility objectives.

Throughout the company, employees understood the difference between lean, agile, and lean startup, and used the techniques, changing enterprise culture along the way. Via the train-the-trainer classes, the team trained over 600 employees in their role-based and team-based five agile coaching classes. Lean pilots were formed as a framework for solving enterprise-level challenges. Finance was getting onboard with incremental budgeting. Legal was the biggest supporter of end-to-end enterprise-level agility. The BDC execution world has changed.

At that time, agile implementation was successfully scaling to division-level with SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)-inspired approach and related training for leaders and SAFe programs.

To solve recruiting challenges, Nancy came up with an Agile Champions program, which was targeted at training and empowering global change agents. The first year of the program, which started with a global Agile Champion gathering in Dublin, Ireland, and finished a year later by graduating a group of 20 strong Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, was a huge success and a great motivation to BDC employees.

Customized lean-agile training for the HR team was a success, with hundreds of BDC human resource professionals embracing the understanding of lean agile culture, environment, values, and agile teams. This supported the lean agile community in aligning on transparency, a vision-driven culture, and self-organizing cross-functional teams. The company was rethinking its rewards and compensation policy from people-based to team-based.

The coaching team that experienced rapid growth in its first year was also getting together and aligning processes, approaches, and motivation. The whole team went on a roadshow and organized an AgileFest in BDC’s Boston, MA office, with one day of trade fair-style training, workshops, and games organized in collaboration with Boston-based BDC Scrum Masters and agile practitioners, and the second day of an “open space” unconference. It also had a panel about enterprise lean agility where Nancy was invited to participate along with Jack and Keith. Things seemed to start getting back on track.

Meanwhile, Keith initiated a large-scale transformation program where lean-agile transformation was just one of the initiatives. He appointed the office of his Chief of Staff to run the program. Cindy, who led the program, was a seasoned IT professional and a long-term company employee. Her work had a significant impact on Nancy’s team as Cindy and her team were collecting metrics and presenting them to leadership. She was also responsible for vendor relationship management, including the primary IT vendor who was providing most of the IT resources to BDC.

One of the IT vendors sent their Agile Coaches to teams in two of BDC’s global locations. These coaches spent several days interviewing BDC lean agile teams and then presented transformation plans on how they would coach them to the next level of agility to their leaders, thus confusing the teams, regional leaders, and clashing their assessment with the work in flight being done by Nancy’s team.

Nancy spoke to Mario, asking for support and alignment, but he shared that there were multiple organizational challenges to his team and there was nothing he could do. His only concern was himself; he personally was not looking good, with several departures of his direct reports since he joined BDC and the negative perception of his own leadership skills by some of his peers. He also mentioned that Cindy and her team would be now collecting enterprise agile metrics at Keith’s request. Nancy took several attempts to reach out to Keith to clarify the expectations but he was unavailable.

With the lack of support from Mario, Nancy felt that she had no choice but to start looking for a job. She shared with Mario how she felt and the only response he gave her was to inform him when she started looking for a job, and so she did. Luckily, the first job interview was successful, and Nancy announced her departure a month later. After announcing her departure, Nancy found out that Mario never shared her challenges with Keith, who had high respect for her and was ultimately disappointed by her departure. This came a surprise to her, but it was too late.

On a sunny day, almost two years after she joined BDC, Nancy left the office, surrounded by her teammates, colleagues, and members of the teams who were proud of their self-organization and the work they were doing. She knew that they would never go back to the top-down mentality. Her thoughts were bittersweet. She knew that she made a difference and that agile and lean was now a norm at BDC.

On the day she announced her departure, she received hundreds of phone calls, visits, and e-mails from BDC employees around the globe. Ruth invited her to lunch and spoke about her leadership and the positive difference she made. Keith invited her and her family to visit him in his home town. Amy sent her a warm farewell letter, and Cindy stopped by to thank her for collaboration. Jack’s team sent her flowers. Mario and the PMO team threw a warm farewell party. Many employees wrote to her stating that they saw her as a role model; they spoke about her leadership, support, how she and her passion for lean, agility, teamwork, alignment, and customer satisfaction changed their lives. And even though she knew that agile and lean would sustain at BDC with the coaching team she built and though she felt proud of the legacy she was leaving behind, this departure surely did not feel like a victory.

On her way out, she met Kristin, who hugged her with tears in her eyes and thanked her for changing the company’s culture and affecting many lives in a positive way, including her own. Fighting her own tears, Nancy thought, I wish I knew how to retain my manager’s support and set realistic expectations after the initial rapid success. I wish I did not have to leave. She wondered which mistakes she made led her to that day.