Welcome to Defining Moments of Leadership, a podcast hosted by Marsha Acker. We’re joined today by guest Ahmed Sidky to explore what it looks like to bring inquiry and a human-centric focus into your leadership. Ahmed is the Head of Business Agility at Riot Games, President of the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile) and Co-founder of the Business Agility Institute. He’s also known as Dr. Agile, and is a well known international thought leader on business agility, helping business leaders achieve sustainable agility. Finally, he is the co-author of the book Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World.

Ahmed views leadership as the untangling of the human web of rational and irrational emotions and feelings. It can get messy and difficult, but those factors are precisely what makes it a leader stand out from the rest. While it’s difficult to single out one defining moment throughout his time as a leader, Ahmed shares a series of moments which stand out to him. When he joined Riot Games 8 years ago, the company was experiencing exponential growth. He was hired with the expectation of helping the company become and remain agile as they grew. However, after accepting the position he was presented with even more expectations than he felt he could handle. He shares the instance in which he learned that there are a different range of stances one must take when mediating a conflict.

The role of a leader is not to respond to every request, but to get to know people on a deep level and inspire them to a new future. Of course Ahmed didn’t know this was his role from day one, but instead came to understand it over time. As the conversation wraps up, Ahmed reveals the effects this idea of a human-centric COO has had in his line of work. He is optimistic for the future and the evolution of Riot.

Ahmed’s Bio

Head of Business Agility at Riot Games, President of the International Consortium for Agile(ICAgile), and co-founder of the Business Agility Institute. Ahmed Sidky, also known as Doctor Agile, is a well-known thought-leader in the Agile community. Ahmed combines over fifteen years of software development experience; with research from his Ph.D. in Agile transformation and agility assessment to help leaders and knowledge workers achieve measurable and sustainable organizational agility by being Agile not just doing Agile.

Dr. Sidky guides enterprise agile transformations in Fortune 100 companies as well as small to medium companies, and educates people on the agile mindset and how to create lean high performing teams, starting from CEOs to junior developers in companies around the world such as: Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, Siemens, Blackboard, Verizon Wireless, Caterpillar, and several agencies in the US Government. He divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing. Ahmed is the co-author of a top-rated Agile adoption book; “Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World.”

Ahmed co-founded the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile) and sat on the steering committee for the creation of the PMI-ACP® certification and was the program chair for the Agile 2009 conference. He has been an invited speaker at numerous Agile Conferences around the world.

Learn more about Ahmed by visiting his website.
Connect with Ahmed on LinkedIn.
Learn more about ICAgile