Growing Up Fast: How New Agile Practices Can Move Marketing and Innovation Past the Old Business Stalemates

Growing Up Fast is a practical book about how to implement an agile marketing process in modern business to create the necessary collaboration between marketing and innovation for business success.

The first half of the book covers the philosophical underpinnings of complementary opposites in nature, human interaction, and the workplace. It surveys business management over the last 100 years and shows how we’ve come to the “Agile Age,” which is not about big ideas Mad Men-style, but lots of little ideas to test and try.

The second half of the book discusses the mindsets and tools required for success in agile work, and examples are given throughout the text in the form of case studies on companies like Netflix, 3M, Microsoft, Domino’s Pizza, and Dell Computer.

The introduction and conclusion of the book set up the metaphor of the book’s title, to personify the current impasse between big regulation government and total free market capitalism. Agile is posed as a third option between the Mom and Dad’s battle between over-planning and wild speculation, concern for the future and obsession with “what worked” in the past—as both occupy our resources without agile process or priorities for the innovations we need going forward in society.

Agile is portrayed as an inquisitive, experimental, brilliant child who still lives above the garage at her parents’ house—and it’s time for her to move out.

"There are also plenty, plenty of high-level remarks out there about how businesses need to be agile — with very little insight about how. Hey, we should all be rich and good-looking too…

But there have been few guides that address the gap between the fluffy and the functional.

Growing Up Fast: How New Agile Practices Can Move Marketing and Innovation Past the Old Business Stalemates by Jascha Kaykas-Wolff and Kevin Fann brilliantly spans that chasm." Scott Brinker @chiefmartec

Jascha Kaykas-Wolff believes in two key principles: find opportunities where no one else is looking and never fail the same way twice-a methodology centered around Agile market- ing practices. Coupled with a B.A. in Psychology from Whittier College, it's served him extremely well as an executive marketer and venture startup consultant at Yahoo!, Microsoft, Webtrends, Involver, Mindjet, BitTorrent and, now, at Mozilla. Jascha lives in Marin County with his wife Rebecca, three whip-smart children, one puppy, one cat, two rats and six or seven fish. You can find him online at @kaykas.

Kevin Fann believes great writing comes from both commercial constraint and artistic vision, that numbers tell stories, too, and that elegant ideas and shared human moments are the only stones worth mining. He has a B.S. in physics and a B.A. in English literature from Vanderbilt University. He lives where he ought between sea and cirque. kfann.com

Sean Martinez designs logos, packaging, music albums, t-shirts, posters, websites and just about anything else he can get his hands on, including collages made from grocery flyers and raw black ink. He believes simplicity is profound and that there's a lot more that can be known than can be proved. He has a B.F.A. from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, where he calls home. seanmtnz.com