The Agile Executive

During my Agile 2006 presentation I made the following recommendation to the audience:

Don’t take your boss to lunch; take him/her to the daily stand-up meeting.

The point I was trying to get across is straightforward: there is no substitute to “touching” Agile and being touched by Agile. Instead of preaching the benefits of Agile, get your executive engaged in the Agile process.

Last week, colleagues Ken Collier, Jonathon Golden and I were on a Cutter Consortium consulting engagement. The CEO of the company we were consulting to immersed himseld  in the workshop. I would say he spent about 50% of his time in the three day workshop in which we worked with his team on Agile and refactoring.

This CEO certainly got it [Agile]. And, he took his CTO and us to lunch.

It might have been a breach of my own counsel don’t take your boss to lunch…