Becoming lean, mean and agile

GRAB buys Uber. Takeda Pharmaceutical buys Shire. Disney - or maybe Comcast - buys most of 21st Century Fox. Around the world, the news these days seems to be all about industry consolidation - the big getting bigger.

But what's happening inside some of these large organisations is exactly the opposite. More and more companies are relying on small, entrepreneurial, self-managing teams to run their businesses. They are adopting the philosophy and toolsets known as agile.

In the past, agile was pretty much confined to IT departments, where it was used in software development. Then it began to seep out into other areas. Teams began using the methodology to create new radio programmes, new farm machines, even new human-resources procedures.