Sherpa Alliance

Would your executives agree?

"Organizational Agility is a core differentiator in today’s rapidly changing business environment" - that’s the number 1 conclusion from a recent (March 2009) report from the Economist Intelligence Unit.  Nearly 90% of the executives surveyed (349 business executives from 8 countries, including the US, 19 industries and with revenues ranging from under $500M to over $5Bn) believe that Organizational Agility is critical for business success. Rapid decision making and execution were also identified as not only important, but essential to a company’s competitive standing.  The report also cites evidence from MIT that agile firms grow revenue 37% faster and generate 30% higher profist than non-agile companies. (Read more:  Organizational Agility - Lost in Translation?)

Would your executives agree with those executives surveyed?  What would your executives think?  This week, try holding a workshop with your team to educate them and facilitate a discussion:

• How important is agility to our organization’s overall business success?
  • When, most recently, did we last experience agility and where did that agility come from?
  • When, most recently, did we experience a lack of agility and where did that lack of agility come from?
• How would we rate our organization’s overall agility?
  • On a great day?
  • On a good day?
  • On a bad day?
• What is our view of the critical traits of an agile business?
  • What’s-working, what’s-not-working, what’s-missing?
  • What should we stop-doing, start-doing or continue-doing in a modified way?

Here are some resources to help you hold that workshop with your team:

• Handouts:  various handouts which you can project electronically and/or print-out to distribute - this one might be the ost useful for a session with your executives or, if your are a Vistage Member you might choose the Fridays-with-Vistage Webinar (February 20th 2009): Execution Excellence for Turbulent Times.
• Opportunity Assessment & 90 Day Plan:  to help you assess where you have opportunities to architect a breakthrough with your organizational agility, which includes a 90 Day Plan; to begin brewing up that breakthrough.
• e-Neswletter:  signing your executives up for the e-newsletter so they will receive these weekly tip and monthly newsletters to track along with this evolving body of work into Organizational Agility.

By the end of this week, you could have an executuive team more enlightened about Organizational Agility as a core differentiator, with an associated vocabulary, concept-suite and model-set, to be translating more strategy and more execution into more traction - with less being lost in translation.