This is a book about organizations that are flexible and quick to adapt to changing environment, markets and customer needs – we call them agile companies or organizations.

These organizations are agile not only in IT and other development projects, but in the whole organization. What characterises them is that they have removed a number of hierarchic and bureaucratic management features that would have suppressed their employees. Such disturbances could be a strong focus on short-term shareholder demands, detailed planning combined with tight monitoring, as well as individual performance-based incentives. By removing these, we argue, there is a good chance that organizations may change from rigid super tankers to agile shoals of fish.

The book presents differences between agile and rigid organisations from both practical and research perspectives and offers numerous cases from the real business world to support its conclusions.