Sherpa Alliance

 The message is coming across loud and clear:  

• "Organizational Agility is a core differentiator in today’s rapidly changing business environment" - that’s the number one conclusion from a recent (March 2009) report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, entitled, “Organizational Agility:  how business can survive and thrive in turbulent times”.  Nearly 90% of the executives surveyed (349 business executives from 8 countries including the US, from 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 profits than non-agile companies.  Click here to read/download the full report.
• “Execution is taking precedence over profit and top-line growth as a focus for CEOs around the world” -  that was the number one conclusion from a recent (October 2007) report from The Conference Board, entitled, “CEO Challenge 2007: Top 10 Challenges”.  Prior to the turbulence of the 2008/2009 credit crunch/recession, when asked to rate their greatest concerns from among 121 different challenges, 769 global CEOs from 40 countries chose Excellence of Execution as their top challenge.  Click here to read more.
• “True champions have the capacity for both agility and absorption” – that’s the top-line conclusion from a recent (February 2009) Harvard Business review article, entitled, “How to Thrive in Turbulent Markets”.  The article outlines the concept of “agile absorption” also citing a recent McKinsey & Company survey which found that 9 out of 10 executives ranked Organizational Agility as both critical to business success and growing in importance over time.  Click here to read more.

While the message is coming across loud and clear, from these inspiring and verifying surveys/articles, our experience is that something gets lost in translation:

• They leave us with a sense-of-void of practical advice for something we could start doing tomorrow morning if we chose to;
• They all usually cite the same kinds of large company case-studies which, while interesting, are very difficult for CEOs/Executives of small-to-medium sized and fast moving businesses to relate to;
• We are left to our own devices to interpret the relevance of this big picture wisdom to our businesses, translate the stratospheric principles into grounded, pragmatic actions and facilitate our teams to undertake the journey or learning, applying and achieving in parallel with them.

That’s what our work is about - filling that sense of void so that things don’t get lost in translation.  We fill the void to help you be more In the Driving Seat of Organizational Agility, translating strategy and execution into traction.  We provide a concept-suite, model-set and tool-box to interpret, translate and facilitate the wisdom from leading edge research, authors and thought-leaders.  We apply our own thought-leadership to filling that void, drawing upon our own real-world experiences and those or our clients and Vistage members, so that nothing gets lost in translation.