agile business

I’m doing research into modern publishing models and how they can affect the way magazine brands distribute content. Although there isn’t a lot of exciting stuff apart from the standard – treat digital as its own publishing channel, I did find this interesting piece from Sourcebooks. They refer to what they are trying to do as The Agile Publishing Model and it is quite new, although actually I think Guy Kawasaki tried to do this with his recent books.

The smart guys at LHBS in Vienna asked me to give a talk on Agile Planning earlier this week as part of their series of "Uncomfortable Talks" designed to promote some good, challenging thinking on the practice of communications and planning. It was helpful in bringing together a bunch of disparate thoughts I've long had around this subject but if I'm honest, it was difficult to know where to stop - it's a subject that touches so much of what we do, so there's a lot more I could've talked about.

After writing about Agile Budgeting, I stumbled serendipitously (as is the way with these things) on a Tom Fishburne post about Waterfall Planning that echoed some of the points I was making. Specifically, how crafting an annual plan is "like getting a bill through Congress", what with all the hours of spreadsheet crunching, debate, negotiation, and compromise, followed by more of the same, before eventually settling on "a plan that is wrong the moment it's inked". Tom goes on to mention Ian Sanders, who gave a talk on Unplanning at last years SXSW (there's also a short e-book here if you're interested).

I make no apology for writing another post on agility. I think it's one of the most fundamental (and often unacknowledged) shifts that businesses need to make in order to be fit for purpose in the world in which we find ourselves. We no longer need to follow the model of creating a perfectly crafted plan, spending a lot of time executing that plan before we ship it, and only then finding out whether it is successful or not.

As part of my ongoing obsession with all things agile, I've written up a summary of some key practices around Agile Marketing, building on the principles outlined in The Agile Manifesto. This is also cross posted over on The Marketing Society blog:

The slow death of Dopplr was a sad thing to read. Whatever the reasons behind it, the atrophy of such an elegantly designed and executed idea is a cheerless thing to behold. But unfortunately it's symptomatic of something of a pattern (MySpace, Bebo, Friends Reunited).

"In the highly turbulent, quickly reforming environment of the new economy, the competitive advantage goes to the nimble and malleable, the flexible and quick. Speed and agility trump size and experience. Fast to find the new is only one half the equation; fast to let go is the other important half." Kevin Kelly