Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular work days. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles about agile business practices.

From the London School of Economics: Beyond the ‘Scrum’: the value of individual work

“Achieving organisational agility requires not only group response; individual action is also key, writes Alessandro Di Fiore.”

From Loizos Heracleous, Douglas Terrier, and Steven Gonzalez: The Reinvention of NASA

“NASA today is a very different beast from the NASA of the 1960s. Though many would call that decade NASA’s golden age, we’d argue that NASA’s innovation and influence is even greater today.”

From the Boston Consulting Group: Agile Starts—or Stops—at the Top

“It’s easier to talk about what needs to change than to make an actual public commitment to new behaviors. The most effective agile leaders commit themselves to daily ‘workouts’—in full view of their colleagues and team members—that involve individual and leadership team action plans.”

Thanks to Miki Saxon for pointing me to this article.

From Marc Le Menestrel: The Key to Cultivating Agility in Decision Making

“Decision-making excellence requires self-awareness and the ability to choose how to think in different situations.”

From the Economist: The fashion for agile management is spreading

“AGILITY is such a modish word in modern management theory that it can seem as if the ideal corporate executive would be a combination of Spider-Man and Simone Biles, a gymnast. The concept has its roots in the idea of ‘lean management’, developed by Toyota in car manufacturing, and in the ‘Agile manifesto’ drawn up by a group of software developers back in 2001.”

Book Suggestions

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland. This was one of the tiop five books I read in 2015. My full review is here

Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction by Chris Sims and Hillary Louise Johnson