style="font-size:15px;"> 2 2. www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/08/23/the-end-of-agile/3 3. apievangelist.com/2012/01/12/the-secret-to-amazons-success-internal-apis/
4 4. Elon Musk on how SpaceX designs and tests: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY
5 5. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law
6 6. medicalxpress.com/news/2016-03-bad-decision-anxiety-blame.html
7 7. Jack Welch; Suzy Welch. Winning. HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition (p. 25).
8 8. press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/027961.html
9 9. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation#Dirac's_coup
10 10. petapixel.com/2019/07/05/goodbye-aberration-physicist-solves-2000-year-old-optical-problem/
11 11. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_quaternions#Hamilton's_discovery
12 12. www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/jeff-bezos-this-is-the-smartest-thing-we-ever-did-at-amazon.html
13 13. www.inc.com/tanya-hall/all-that-collaboration-is-hurting-your-results-heres-why.html
14 14. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494408000728
15 15. www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google-got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/
16 16. www.bmmagazine.co.uk/in-business/not-all-developers-like-agile-and-here-are-5-reasons-why/
17 17. blog.echobind.com/4-ways-to-optimize-an-agile-environment-with-nudge-management-2adbb2878d9f
3 Leadership: The Core Issue
If an organization has good leadership, everything else will follow. If an organization has bad leadership, no methodology or set of rules will save you.
Elon Musk's companies have demonstrated not only unprecedented innovation but competitiveness, altering and taking the lead in entire industries. Musk sees innovation as a strategic process to be managed and grown. When Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, asked Musk what it will take to get to Mars, Musk's response was not about rockets or money; his response was about the needed rate of innovation:
“I'm trying to make sure that our rate of innovation increases… this is really essential… if we do not see something close to an exponential improvement in our rate of innovation we will not reach Mars.”1
Zubrin then asked about Musk's methodology. Zubrin said this:
“One thing that is really amazing about SpaceX to those of us who have experience in the aerospace industry is the rate of innovation. Last time you spoke to the Mars Society convention it was 2012. Since then you have made Falcon 9 reusable, introduced Falcon Heavy, Crew Dragon, a satellite constellation, and you're in the middle of developing Starship. What is your methodology that allows you to innovate so swiftly?”
Musk's response was, after a long pause, “I don't really know.”
What makes SpaceX and Musk's other companies so successful and so innovative is not a methodology; it is the leadership that Musk provides.
This is why leadership is the core issue for understanding how a group of individuals can work together effectively. The issue cannot be sidestepped. Bad leadership is often a terrible problem, but dismissing the need for leadership does not solve the problem. We must deal with it head-on.
Authority Is Sometimes Necessary
The Agile Manifesto tried to address the issue of the bad manager by ignoring the need for managers, implicitly saying that managers are not part of the equation. That is like trying to deal with bad friendships by dispensing with friendship. According to Mark Schwartz, former CIO of the US Citizenship and Immigration Service and a well-known Agile and DevOps evangelist,
“The Agile world, ever suspicious of management, proceeds as if it can manage without the involvement of IT leaders.” 2
A manager is, by definition, a leader who has authority. Authority at the top is unavoidable. An organization has owners or shareholders and a board or a government-appointed leader who has oversight. The question is, is authority needed at other levels?
The Agile Manifesto is silent about the role of managers. Typically, in most organizations, a manager has direct staff, and those people are the manager's team. The Agile Manifesto's principle “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams” seems to advocate that teams do best when self-organized, which implies that managers play no direct role. The Agile community has struggled over the years to figure out how to integrate managers into Agile ways of working.
