st It may seem like a 21 century phenomenon, but the mandate for big companies to become more ‘agile’ actually goes back decades. As MIT Sloan School Prof. Michael Cusumano reminds us in our recent interview with him ‘From Making Autos to Making Software: The Evolution of Lean and Agile’, in the 1980s Japanese automobile manufacturers were producing cars faster on the assembly line than their U.S. and European peers, with less labor, and fewer defects—all the while reducing the time it took to develop new models. Cusumano and his MIT colleagues referred to these manufacturing methods as ‘lean.’ In many ways, it was a precursor to agile. Software powerhouse Microsoft, which Cusumano studied in the 1990s, applied what are now called ‘agile’ practices to designing and developing software— before the authors of the Agile Manifesto put their label on the practice and posted their document in 2001. In our interview, Cusumano lays out what’s new and old about agile. 7