[Agile] expects performance and forces action if it doesn’t occur. It assumes a workforce who know what they are doing and provides a transparent framework for them to show what they can do. If the group doesn’t deliver at the end of each short cycle, then that is painfully apparent to everyone—immediately, not years later when the project runs out of money and the software doesn’t work. Agile is a way of forcing either high performance or change.

Agile squeezes out mediocrity and requires high-performance. Hierarchical bureaucracy breeds incompetence and feeds off mediocrity: the organization performs accordingly. Faced with the choice between high-performance and the mediocrity, traditional management opts for mediocrity.

Testing allows you to constantly react to user preferences, but that doesn’t necessarily make you agile; 10,000 ongoing tweaks don’t add up to a fundamental change of direction when one is needed. Almost every successful company has to radically alter course at some point, and often such double-down decisions can’t be made in degrees or with a soft launch. And just as a testing culture can make it hard to address the big problems, it can also make it hard to stop sweating the small stuff.

“The constant need for insights has shaped the creative process. In fact, these radical breakthroughs are so valuable that we’ve invented traditions and rituals that increase the probability of an epiphany, making us more likely to hear those remote associations coming from the right hemisphere. Just look at poets, who often rely on literary forms with strict requirements, such as haikus and sonnets. At first glance, this writing method makes little sense, since the creative act then becomes much more difficult. Instead of composing freely, poets frustrate themselves with structural constraints. Unless poets are stumped by the form, unless they are forced to look beyond the obvious associations, they’ll never invent an original line. They’ll be stuck with clichés and conventions, with predictable adjectives and boring verbs. And this is why poetic forms are so important. When a poet needs to find a rhyming word with exactly three syllables or an adjective that fits the iambic scheme, he ends up uncovering all sorts of unexpected connections; the difficulty of the task accelerates the insight process.”
- Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works

“What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product – the rest is noise.”
- Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and Adsense

“If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
- Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn

The classic MBA product development model is shrouded in secrecy and mystique: develop the offering in private, make everyone involved sign non-disclosure agreements, raise millions of dollars in venture capital, spend years making it perfect, then unveil your creation to the astonishment of the world and the thunderous sound of ringing cash registers.

Unfortunately, this mentality ruins careers and empties bank accounts. On their own, ideas are largely worthless – discovering whether or not you can actually make them work in reality is the most important job of any entrepreneur.

Don’t be shy about showing potential customers your work in progress. Unless you work in an industry with unusually aggressive, competent, and well-funded competitors, you really don’t have to worry about other people “stealing” your idea. Ideas are cheap—what counts is the ability to translate an idea into reality, which is much more difficult than recognizing a good idea.

“Stealth mode” diminishes your early learning opportunities, putting you at a huge early disadvantage. It’s almost always better to focus on getting feedback from real customers as quickly as you possibly can.”

- Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA

Eric Ries, in his brilliant book The Lean Startup, gives a great example of why this approach works:

Why does stuffing one envelope at a time get the job done faster even though it seems like it would be slower? Because our intuition doesn’t take into account the extra time required to sort, stack, and move around the large piles of half- complete envelopes when it’s done the other way. It seems more efficient to repeat the same task over and over, in part because we expect that we will get better at this simple task the more we do it. Unfortunately, in process-oriented work like this, individual performance is not nearly as important as the overall performance of the system.

But even if the amount of time that each process took was exactly the same, the small batch production approach still would be superior, and for even more counterintuitive reasons. For example, imagine that the letters didn’t fit in the envelopes. With the large- batch approach, we wouldn’t find that out until nearly the end. With small batches, we’d know almost immediately.

All these issues are visible in a process as simple as stuffing envelopes, but they are of real and much greater consequence in the work of every company, large or small. What if it turns out that the customers have decided they don’t want the product? Which process would allow a company to find this out sooner?