However, introducing agile approaches into their business—a proven means for speeding efforts to innovate and compete—is dicult. But it is no longer an option. Realizing this, several retailers worldwide are on an end-to-end value chain transformation to become agile, digital enterprises. The Reluctant Agilists While there is great enthusiasm across the retail industry for agile adoption, there is also great resistance— frequently from functional managers fearful of losing authority, and from leaders reluctant to flatten their organizations—exacerbated by an industry-wide unfamiliarity with agile fundamentals. We have seen some retailers attempting partial adoptions of the agile approach—what we call ‘proxy agile’. They do this by slicing existing projects into smaller projects, hoping to gain speed. The IT organization’s ways of working may change, but the business decision- makers do not. These projects retain the overall scale of traditional ‘waterfall’ software development projects and thus cannot respond quickly to (or even collect) customer feedback. Nor can they test and release products rapidly enough. As a result, they fail to help retailers make rapid innovations.