August 4, 2023

Agility of a Business Organization and Its Performance - McKinsey & Other Top Management Consultants



Definition of Organizational agility

Organizational agility is the capacity to identify and capture opportunities more quickly than rivals do. (Donald Sull, Don Sull is professor of management practice at the London Business School and author of The Upside of Turbulence, which introduced the concept of operational, portfolio, and strategic agility)  In the article Competing through organizational agility, McKinsey Quarterly, December 2009,  

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289616104_Competing_through_organizational_agility






Organizational agility is invaluable.


The Agility Factor

A few large companies in every industry show consistently superior profitability relative to their peers, and they all have one thing in common: a highly developed capacity to adapt their business to change.
by Thomas Williams, Christopher G. Worley, and Edward E. Lawler III
(Thomas Williams is a senior executive advisor with Booz & Company. Based in Ridgway, Colo., he specializes in strategy, organization, and management systems for energy and industrial companies.)
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00188?gko=6a0ba


Defining organizational agility


Aaron De Smet: Agility is the ability of an organization to renew itself, adapt, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, ambiguous, turbulent environment.
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-keys-to-organizational-agility


Agility - More Details


The benefits of enhanced agility include higher revenues, more satisfied customers and employees, improved operational efficiency, and a faster time to market.

There are three distinct types of agility: strategic, portfolio, and operational. 

Strategic agility consists of spotting and seizing game-changing opportunities in product and market space. 

Portfolio agility is the capacity to shift resources—including cash, talent, and managerial attention—quickly and effectively out of less promising business areas and into more attractive ones. 

And operational agility involves exploiting opportunities (acquiring new technologies, facilities and changing processes) within a focused business model.

Strategic agility

Strategic agility - Three principles have proved useful for other companies.

Probing for opportunities information on future opportunities.

The value of small-scale probes to help companies explore potential opportunities. In the late 1980s, a financial company explored other European markets, the United States, and Latin America through small acquisitions, minority stakes, and alliances. Some of these probes paid off, others didn’t, but collectively they exposed the company to diverse opportunity streams. When currency crises roiled Latin America’s markets in the late 1990s, the company seized the moment, making a series of investments to build the region’s largest banking franchise. 

Established companies can invest modest amounts of cash—in the form of minority stakes or participation in joint ventures—to buy access to information on future opportunities.


Mitigating risk

Some managers cloak recklessness under the mantle of strategic agility. The most effective leaders, however, systematically minimize the downside risk of upside bets. 

During acquisitions, a company actively managed risks by screening potential acquisitions for access to growth markets, low-cost labor, energy, and raw materials to boost the odds of future profitability. The company avoided overpaying, instead buying money-losing mills from government owners in Trinidad and Mexico for about 10 percent of their construction cost, while convincing the governments to finance most of the purchase price. The company’s due-diligence teams consisted of operating executives from its other  plants, who would be responsible for integrating the plant if acquired—an approach that ensured a realistic assessment of its potential and an actionable integration plan.

Companies have to do a thorough analysis of the strategic opportunities  in order to surface and mitigate possible risks.

Staying in the game

Sometimes, the key is simply staying in the game until a big chance emerges. Apple’s launch of the iPod and move into the digital music business is, rightly, the stock example of game-changing strategic agility. But it was Apple’s ability to stay in the game long enough to wait for the opportunity to arise that made the difference. During the 1990s, Apple’s share of the personal-computer market fell below 5 percent and its stock price was flat from the late 1980s through early 2004. But it survived long enough  to wait for new contextual circumstances to generate a golden opportunity.

Staying in the game requires several structural attributes that allow a company to weather changes in the market and live to fight another day. The attributes include sheer size; diversification of cash flows; customer lock-in; low fixed costs; rare resources, such as brands, expertise, or hard assets that customers will pay for and resilient work force which withstands low growth period with enthusiasm to experiment and learn new things.

An environment like the one we’ve been experiencing, where cash is scarce, represents an opportune moment for executives to inventory all of their companies’ sources of resilience and to develop a plan to stay in the game. 




Why agility Pays

http://kingglobalinc.com/insights/why-agility-pays/


The 10 Dimensions Of Business Agility

Enabling Bottom-Up Decisions In A World Of Rapid Change
September 9, 2013
https://www.forrester.com/report/The+10+Dimensions+Of+Business+Agility/-/E-RES98503
(Access forrester database)

According to a new report from Forrester Research, there are 10 dimensions that define business agility, and companies can use them to effectively measure their maturity in the space. These dimensions span three main areas — market, organizational, and process — and include: 

  • channel integration, 
  • market responsiveness, 
  • knowledge dissemination, 
  • digital psychology, 
  • change management, 
  • business intelligence, 
  • infrastructure elasticity, 
  • process architecture, 
  • software innovation, and 
  • sourcing and supply chain.


Traits of truly agile businesses

Exploring the best practices leading companies adopt to drive business agility.
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-traits-truly-agile-businesses

Leadership imperatives for an agile business
Learn how the traits of effective leadership can create a more agile business.
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-leadership-imperatives-agile-business


The Agile Organization: How to Build an Innovative, Sustainable and Resilient Business



Linda Holbeche
Kogan Page Publishers, 03-Jun-2015 - Business & Economics - 288 pages

Given today's context of tough change, organizations need to be able to innovate as well as develop and implement strategy quickly and efficiently. The key to this is agility - a set of capabilities that can help organizations to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances. At the same time, resilience is also essential if benefits are going to endure over the longer term and if employees are to be kept on board. The Agile Organization focuses on how to build both agility and resilience at individual, team and organizational levels. It draws on a wealth of research, including the lived experience and learning of managers and HR and organization development (OD) professionals to show how it is possible to 'square the circle', becoming more sustainably agile while also enhancing employee engagement and resilience. The Agile Organization showcases the latest thinking - new organizational models, ground-breaking themes and case studies - that illustrate how organizations are addressing the challenge of developing organizational agility. Packed with helpful checklists and practice pointers, this book is a 'go to' guide for senior leaders and managers, HR and OD specialists who want to help bring about organizational transformation and create the new resiliently agile 'business as usual'.
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=vba6CQAAQBAJ

Agility is a prerequisite for all organizations to survive.

PWC

Building Agile Enterprises


https://www.pwc.com/us/en/technology/publications/assets/enterprise-agility.pdf

KPMG

Innovation And Strategic Agility In A Time Of Recession

July 28, 2009 By Jurjan Huisman
https://kpmg-innovationfactory.com/blog/2009/07/28/innovation-and-strategic-agility-in-a-time-of-recession/





Ud. 29.12.2023, 5.8.2023, 15.7.2023
Pub. 12.10.2018




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