Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility

Agile Leadership Techniques Focused on What Matters Most: Business Value and Competitive Advantage

Whether you’re leading an organization, a team, or a project, Stand Back and Deliver gives you the agile leadership tools you’ll need to achieve breakthrough levels of performance. It brings together immediately-usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help you focus all your efforts where they matter most: delivering business value and building competitive advantage.

You’ll first discover how to use the authors’ Purpose-Based Alignment Model to make better up-front decisions on where to invest limited resources–and how to filter out activities that don’t drive market leadership. Next, you’ll learn how to collaborate in new ways that unleash your organization’s full talents for innovation. The authors offer practical tools for understanding the unique challenges of any project and tailoring your leadership approach to reflect them. You’ll find a full chapter on organizing information to promote more effective, value-driven decision-making. Finally, drawing on decades of experience working with great leaders, the authors focus on a critical issue you’ll face over and over again: knowing when to step up and lead, and when to stand back and let your team work.

Coverage includes:

• Effectively evaluating, planning, and implementing large system projects
• Reducing resistance to process improvements
• Bringing greater agility to the way you manage products, portfolios, and projects
• Identifying the tasks that don’t create enough value to be worth your time
• Developing the forms of collaboration that are crucial to sustaining innovation
• Mitigating project risks more effectively–especially those associated with complexity
• Refocusing all decision-making on delivering value to the organization and the marketplace
• Making decisions at the right time to leverage the best information without stifling progress

Pollyanna Pixton is an international collaborative leadership expert who has developed models for collaboration and collaborative leadership throughout her 38 years of working inside and consulting with corporations and organizations. Pollyanna helps leaders create companies where talent and innovation are unleashed–making them more productive, efficient, and profitable. She was primarily responsible for leading the development of the Swiss electronic stock exchange. In addition, she has developed control systems for electrical power plants throughout the world and merged the technologies and data systems of large financial institutions.

Niel Nickolaisen started his career in engineering, but then got involved with process improvement methods such as Lean and Six Sigma. The need to improve processes soon pulled him into managing large, put-the-business-at-risk IT projects and then IT leadership. Niel has a passion for focusing and aligning teams and organizations, and for finding ways to reduce both process and system complexity. His motto is, “Let’s do more smart stuff and less stupid stuff.”

Todd Little is a chemical engineer turned petroleum engineer who has been developing software products for more than thirty years. For more than twenty years, he has led teams and groups of teams in keeping the focus on delivering results on a regular basis. Todd has been quite active in the agile software development movement, as it is well aligned with his own observations about the importance of proper attention to purpose, people, and process in “making ship happen.”

Kent McDonald has nearly fifteen years of experience as a project and program manager in a variety of industries, ranging from automotive to financial services. Throughout those various projects, he has always striven to keep his team’s focus on the purpose of the project, avoiding where possible extraneous activities that do not add any actual value to the completion of the project. Kent has observed that properly aligned projects that follow the right methodology and utilize collaboration, regardless of the approach they use, are usually the most effective and add the most value to the organization.