The Agile Leader

We need to disrupt existing business models to drive growth in our unpredictable world. This book can help leaders to think differently, to agitate for change and to take others on a transformation journey. It highlights the importance of culture, behaviour, and ways of working.

To be agile, you need to try and test things. Not everything you try is going to work. Fail small, fail fast, and learn quickly. The Agile Leader demonstrates that agility is not just about creating things. It's also about ruthless prioritisation, managing risk, and knowing when to stop. This book helps leaders to make choices that define their business success on a day-to-day basis. If you're not moving forward and innovating and changing things, then your competitors will be.

In The Agile Leader, Simon Hayward develops the approach to building an agile organization that he introduced in his first book, Connected Leadership. He looks at how many successful organizations are led by their customers, working with them to constantly innovate and improve, for mutual benefit. He also focuses on the importance of simplifying business processes and breaking down silos to encourage collaboration. In an uncertain climate, businesses need to be adaptable, flexible and always evolving. As well as spotting opportunities for growth, we need to make decisions quickly to seize these opportunities. We have adopted many of the principles of agile leadership at Pentland Brands to future-proof our own organization.

With disruption happening in every industry and customer behaviour changing all the time, agility has become a highly-prized leadership skill. By reacting with agility to changing customer needs and focusing effort where it will have greatest impact, this book shows where leaders can gain quick wins as well as achieving long-term, sustainable success.

This book explains very clearly just what makes agile leadership different to traditional leadership. Making the shift towards a more agile style of leadership can be a huge challenge. Simon Hayward offers a range of insights and advice to help you to make that shift in a sustainable way.