Agile marketing is about focus, not speed: Operational best practices from CMOs on the rebound

Early each week, we ask CMO Coffee Talk participants to choose from four possible discussion topics for the upcoming Friday morning’s chat.  And last week, nearly 70 percent wanted to learn more about how to be agile.
Turns out there’s agile and then there’s Agile.  And there’s a difference.  Both have value, trade-offs and caveats.
We learned a ton about Agile Marketing (as well as how to generally be agile successfully) on Friday from Andrea Fryrear, president of AgileSherpas.  Among the best practices she shared as well as those reinforced by CMO attendees:
Agile is about focus first, speed second: Many people get it the other way around, which just means you’re getting more stuff done in random, unproductive order.
Agile assumes strategy already exists: Agile cannot be used as an excuse for not having objectives, not having strategy and not having direction.  An agile mentality helps you primarily filter the noise into a