Focused, Fast and Flexible

Book excerpt: As a business leader and strategist it falls to you to make sense of this complicated and turbulent world. You need to respond better and faster than ever before by using new tools and constructs that create higher value, more engagement, and greater longevity for your enterprise. But how are you going to accomplish this? The clear answer is that you and your organization must become agile-focused, fast, and flexible-where the alignment of people, processes, and technology continuously adapt to changing conditions. This capability will enable you to continually anticipate, monitor, and adjust to trends and the new dynamics, so you and your enterprise not only survive but thrive. Authors Nick Horney and Tom O'Shea offer you an approach developed in the course of more than fifteen years of study working with dozens of organizations and thousands of leaders. This research-based "next practice" model frames the essential drivers of organizational agility, identifies the processes that enable each driver, and clarifies the domains and potential outcomes of a serious effort to become agile.