The NDA Bookshelf is our regular feature highlighting the must-read books to survive and thrive in the digital industry. We ask some of our favourite authors why their latest book is such vital reading and why exactly you should bother reading it.
Neil Perkin is the author of Agile Transformation: Structures, Processes and Mindsets for the Digital Age.
Describe your book in five words.
Scaling agile for real transformation
Why should I read it?
In the face of rapidly changing competitive and customer contexts, just about every organisation is on a mission to transform and accelerate capability, and to achieve a step change in organisational agility.
Yet many are still stuck with outdated structures, processes and cultures. This book is a blueprint to put scaled agile principles and practice at the heart of transformation.
It’s about creating the culture and mindsets to achieve lasting change. It’s about the real challenge of transformation — optimising for business as usual whilst still reinventing the business of the future.
What are the three biggest things I’ll learn from it?
Agile Transformation is about how and why agile thinking can transform business to become fit for purpose for a very different world.
How to develop an organisational operating system that can enable continuous innovation, making smarter decisions about the scaling and application of adaptive thinking and processes.
How to create the organisational structures, team performance and leadership behaviours that can support real change.
Who’s the ideal reader?
Anyone frustrated by the slow pace of change within their own company. Change agents, intrapreneurs, corporate mavericks. Leaders seeking to catalyse business agility and looking for a blueprint for how to do it.
What are your top three business books?
I loved Bruce Daisley’s book on The Joy of Work, and I’m a fan of Amy Edmondson’s ideas around psychological safety captured in her book Teaming.
For a book which is not strictly just about business but has broad business application, I really like Dan Pink’s book Drive, which focuses on the surprising truth of what motivates people in the workplace
