"Rethinking Agile: Why Agile Teams Have Nothing to Do with Business Agility" is a book with an agenda, and Leopold is refreshingly upfront about it. The agenda is to challenge the assumption that fixing your teams is the same as fixing your organisation. It is not a long book — you can read it in an afternoon — but it is a clarifying one.

The central argument

Leopold's thesis is straightforward: most Agile investment is concentrated at the team level, which is the wrong level for producing business agility. Teams can become excellent at delivering working software in short cycles. But if those teams are working on the wrong things, waiting on decisions that take weeks to reach them, or coordinating with other teams through processes that were designed for waterfall delivery, their team-level excellence is not translating into organisational outcomes.

Business agility — the ability of the whole organisation to respond to change and deliver value — requires changes at the coordination and strategic levels, not just at the team level. This is the problem Flight Levels was developed to address, and this book is the most accessible introduction to that thinking.

What makes it worth reading

The book is not a dry theoretical argument. Leopold writes with a directness that is rare in the Agile literature. He is genuinely critical of the scaling frameworks that promise to take team-level agility and multiply it into organisational agility by adding more process and structure. His case is that more structure at the wrong level does not produce the outcome; it produces overhead.

The real-world examples are well-chosen. The recurring patterns he identifies — teams that are agile but the organisation is not, scaling efforts that create coordination complexity rather than coordination clarity — are recognisable from any significant Agile adoption. If you have experienced a transformation that changed how teams work without meaningfully changing how the organisation performs, this book explains why.

The practical contribution

The second half of the book moves from critique to construction. Leopold outlines what genuine business agility requires: visibility at the coordination layer, strategic clarity about what is most important, and the right conversations happening between the right people at the right frequency. This is the Flight Levels thinking in its most accessible form.

For coaches, the book provides a useful reframe for conversations about scope of change: the question is not "how do we improve this team?" but "at what level is the most significant constraint to flow?" That is a more useful question, and it tends to lead to more useful interventions.

Who should read it

This book is most valuable for Agile coaches and practitioners who have been working at the team level and have a nagging sense that something larger is not changing. It is also valuable for business leaders who have invested in Agile transformation and are wondering why the organisational performance improvements have not materialised at the scale promised.

It is a short, honest read that will likely change how you think about where the real work of Agile transformation actually lives.