Steve Berez

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About Steve Berez
Steve Berez is a Boston-based partner at Bain & Company. He is a founder of Bain’s Enterprise Technology practice and was until recently its Americas head. Steve is also a senior leader in our Agile and Healthcare practices.
Steve first joined Bain in 1980 and has been with the firm for a total of nearly 30 years. Over the past decade, he has helped dozens of firms across industries and around the world improve the speed, agility, and effectiveness of their technology-based innovation.
Steve has driven agile transformations for industry leaders in health, P&C, and life insurance; healthcare delivery; retail banking; consumer and industrial products; retail; transportation; and technology. He also has deep experience in technology strategy and operating model redesign, especially in the context of digital strategy and innovation; software engineering and product management; architecture transformation and complexity reduction, including cloud adoption and core systems modernization; and technology-enabled growth strategy.
Steve’s forthcoming book, Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos, will be published by Harvard Business Review Press in May 2020. Steve’s recent articles include “Agile Is Not Enough” (Sloan Management Review), “It’s Time to Rethink the IT Talent Model” (Sloan Management Review), “How Agile Is Powering Healthcare Innovation” (In Vivo), “How to Plan and Budget for Agile at Scale” (Bain.com), and “Four Myths of Digital Transformation: What Only 8% of Companies Know” (Bain.com).
Steve received an MBA degree from Stanford University, where he was named a Miller Scholar. He also earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received MIT’s highest award, the Compton Prize. He has agile certifications in Scrum and SAFe.
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Books By Steve Berez
Agile has the power to transform work--but only if it's implemented the right way.
For decades business leaders have been painfully aware of a huge chasm: They aspire to create nimble, flexible enterprises. But their day-to-day reality is silos, sluggish processes, and stalled innovation. Today, agile is hailed as the essential bridge across this chasm, with the potential to transform a company and catapult it to the head of the pack.
Not so fast. In this clear-eyed, indispensable book, Bain & Company thought leader Darrell Rigby and his colleagues Sarah Elk and Steve Berez provide a much-needed reality check. They dispel the myths and misconceptions that have accompanied agile's rise to prominence--the idea that it can reshape an organization all at once, for instance, or that it should be used in every function and for all types of work. They illustrate that agile teams can indeed be powerful, making people's jobs more rewarding and turbocharging innovation, but such results are possible only if the method is fully understood and implemented the right way.
The key, they argue, is balance. Every organization must optimize and tightly control some of its operations, and at the same time innovate. Agile, done well, enables vigorous innovation without sacrificing the efficiency and reliability essential to traditional operations. The authors break down how agile really works, show what not to do, and explain the crucial importance of scaling agile properly in order to reap its full benefit. They then lay out a road map for leading the transition to a truly agile enterprise.
Agile isn't a goal in itself; it's a means to becoming a high-performance operation. Doing Agile Right is a must-have guide for any company trying to make the transition--or trying to sustain high agility.