Jesper Toubøl, Vice President E&M Elements & Moulds at LEGO, explains how LEGO has shaped business success through sound agile principles
Leadership in transformation
Today many businesses face practically ruthless demands to be ready for changes due to constantly shifting needs in the business environment. On top of this, technological developments often surprise many of us – they come faster and with very little warning.
This also means that leadership is undergoing a transformation. Agile methods are gaining even more ground based on the assumption that business initiatives (project, customer orders, product development etc.) are not static, and that the new knowledge can (and should be) be acquired along the way and applied to the initiative in focus immediately. In short agile leadership has become the solution to some weaknesses that plan-driven management has struggled with.
Agility as a way of thinking is one thing another is the concrete development mythologies characterized by agility. In other words, we can talk about something mental: a kind of “mindset” or “culture” and a tangible set of tools that support the agile mindset. There are practical tools we use such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe etc. – each presents its own suggestion for managing different part of the agile process.