I've dedicated my life to working in Agile in large organizations for over 10 hears.
Over this time, I've seen two themes repeatedly show up that essentially doom efforts to bring Agile to the Enterprise. These two “impediments” to Enterprise agility are addressed by neither the Agile Manifesto nor the Scrum framework in any meaningful way. But it doesn't mean all large enterprises can't be Agile.
#1: The Project Management Mindset
Many large organizations are still caught in the first Industrial Revolution, focused on Taylor-istic optimization of the industrial “project management” mindset.
This reduces all work to a series of Gantt charts, completely devoid of a value-centric Product thinking focus, with the only metrics of success being the inwardly-focused Iron Triangle:
Scope
Schedule
Budget
As long as a "project" can be "delivered" within Scope, on Schedule, and within Budget, the Enterprise considers it a success.
But this completely ignores the users on the other end of the equation - does a user really care if a feature was delivered on time and on budget, if users can't figure out how to get any value from it?
#2: The lack of client focus
The general lack of regular client-centricity comes through in many corporate decisions.
Projects are long, drawn-out, multi-year efforts that farm out talking to people to an agency that does "user research" and provides them a slick PowerPoint that typically gets ignored as the "project" is executed.
How Amazon does it differently...
As Amazon has aptly proven, organizational size doesn't have to mean a less Agile enterprise.
Flipping these two challenges around are at the heart of what Amazon does best:
#1: Starting with the client
Everything Amazon does begins with working backwards from a great client experience.
From Day One, Amazon has been focused on a great client experience, and it governs how they work, documented in the great book "Working Backwards."
#2: The Product Mindset and product management
Amazon focuses on modern Product Management.
Product management as a discipline leads with delivering continuous streams of value over one-off "projects" that need to be "managed" within the Iron Triangle.
Amazon's relentless customer-centricity drives their ability to continuously pivot and innovate to deliver value that delights their users, proving that size is no barrier to business agility.