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Professionalism in Agile
How a lack of showing professionalism is restraining agile.
Even though agile is being adopted by many companies worldwide, the adoption often stops short at a certain level upwards — executives, steering boards, and oversight committees are often not part of the equation. One of the many reasons is a disconnect between the outer appearance of agile and the admiration of professionalism at the executive level. If agile wants to be taken seriously at all levels of corporate business, it will have to overcome its own reputation.
In his famous blog about the banking world, for the British newspaper The Guardian, Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk wrote the following: “The biggest compliment you can get in the [London] City is ‘professional’. It means you do not let emotions get in the way of work, let alone morals.”
If you ever get the chance, please read the highly entertaining and at the same time utterly scary, ‘Swimming with Sharks: Inside the World of the Bankers’, by Luyendijk. The more pages I read, the more I realized just how much many managers in any big company act as the featured bankers. See https://www.amazon.com/Swimming-Sharks-Inside-World-Bankers/dp/1783350652/
