I was reading the report from the Learning Consortium that is associated with the Scrum Alliance and Stephen Denning, and what I liked about the report is that it was not religious about Scrum, or Kanban, or SAFe, or any of the common jargon regarding Agile/Lean organizations.  Rather, it emphasized entrepreneurialism.

I’ve been learning this Agile/Lean ‘thing’ for more than a decade and this entrepreneurial ‘thing’ for better than two decades.

What does entrepreneurial mean?

According to Merriam-Webster.com, entrepreneur means:

one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise

The definition seems to imply that an entrepreneur is a single person, but from my experience, it is a mindset.  For instance.  10 years ago, I joined a new start-up organization called Agilex.  This was a very well funded startup that was focused on delivering professional services (consulting, design, development, testing, etc) primarily to the Federal Government.   Clearly, the founders who risked their own money to get this business off the ground were entrepreneurs; but, so where the initial 100 to 200 hires.  In fact, the first 50 hires where designated as company ‘founders’.   As one of the early hires, I personally felt I was part of the ‘entrepreneur’ umbrella.  As we built Agile Engineering practices across the organization, I also found that our hiring practices quickly moved from primarily focused on technical skills qualifications, to folks that had an “entrepreneur mindset”.  That meant they would question the status quo, be willing to take risks, had a passion for their work, got their hands dirty doing the work, and spent time reading/researching and constantly learning.  We believed that these qualities were foundational to building an Agile/Lean culture and mindset.

We never looked at building an Agile/Lean culture by hiring folks that were just Agile/Lean experts.  Sure, we hired some of those, but we needed folks that were willing to take a chance and grow.  In fact, many of the early hires were all entrepreneurs at heart.  I’d venture to guess that of the first 100 hires, less than 10 percent really had an understanding of what ‘Agile’ was.  That deep down passion to learn, grow, and succeed was the right mix of personality and mindset to embrace an idea like Agile/Lean and begin to influence the culture of the organization.  Particularly an organization that operates within an industry that is steeped in tradition, policy, and regulation.

Question: What do you think is necessary to build or shift an organization towards an Agile/Lean culture? Entrepreneurialism? Something else? You can leave a comment by clicking here.