Definition Strategic Agility. Description.
Strategic Agility is a company's ability or capacity to continuously adjust and adapt its strategic direction by identifying and decisively seizing major, game-changing opportunities when they arise. Like other forms of agility, such as operational agility, portfolio agility and organizational agility, the underlying idea is being quick on your feet, nimble, responsive, always alert. However in the case of strategic agility the focus is on the need for flexible, fast adaptive strategy formation.
A major challenge with achieving strategic agility is to balance this ability to respond and adapt quickly to changing market conditions with having a relatively stable direction (strategic vision) and key corporate resources.
Typical examples of this type of organizational agility are:
Specific organizational capabilities to be strategically agile include (Donald Sull in HBR, February 2009):
- Strong capability to finance big bets.
- Flexible governance structure.
- Long-term perspective by shareholders and executives.
Other organizational capabilities to be a strategically fast company are (Jocelyn R. Davis ad Tom Atkinson in HBR, May 2010):
- Align senior leaders to strategic initiatives.
- Innovation teams capture and communicate lessons learned.
- Develop the ability to explore new technologies rather than improve quality or lower costs.
 In their book 'Fast Strategy: How strategic agility will help you stay ahead of the game' (2008), Yvez Doz and Mikko Kosonen formulate 4 Key Enabling Capabilities for Strategic Agility:
- Strategic Sensitivity (seeing and framing opportunities and threats in a new way, in time)
- Casting a wide net.
- Multiple levels of analysis.
- Including understanding of one's creeping and binding "lock ins".
- Collective Commitment (collective decision-making and commitment)
- Keep the top level meetings focused on strategy.
- Create culture of holistic accountability instead of silos.
- Make time for full information sharing and interaction.
- Treat personal objectives and concerns as critical inputs.
- Have a FAIR process that allows for needed UNEQUAL resource allocation.
- Resource Fluidity (fast and efficient resource mobilization, redeployment)
- Some resources are more fluid (money, brand) than others (key people, fixed inputs, special relationships with clients).
- Challenge is cognitive and political rather than procedural or financial.
- Generative growth (on the edges) is key.
- Maximize knowledge sharing with outside parties (Compare: Co-Creation).
- Experiment.
- Management Depoliticization
- Most top teams are, for natural reasons, collections of independent individuals with strong opinions rather than inspiring and innovative teams.
- Teams need to be organized for mutual interdependencies, with incentives to match.
- Cognitive diversity is a key precondition to high-quality internal dialogs (Compare: Cross-Functional Team)
- Use young rising leaders as a shadow management team focused on the future.
- Have an OPEN strategy process.
- Leaders must learn to ASK and ADAPT rather than to DECIDE and TELL.
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 The Transformative Business Model (Kavadias c.s.)
A business model represents a plan or recipe for the successful operation of a business, identifying source of revenue, the intended customer base, products, and details of financing. Those features interact in complex ways to determine a company’s o...
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Agility is Based on Competition and Survival
The theory of agility is framed on the concepts of competitive survival methods.
While such theories may have been appropriate in the past, serving the winners and keeping the losers in their place, the recent and perpetually continuing financi...
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Studying the Role of Early Adopters and Early Majority
Strategic decision making of agile firms must be based on analysis and information of the industry early adopters and majority.
Moore (2002), in his book, 'Crossing the Chasm', details a Technology Adoption Life Cycle.
- "What the early ...
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What is Strategic Agility? Definition
The ability to continuously adjust and adapt strategic direction in core business, as a function of strategic ambitions and changing circumstances, and create not just new product and services, but also new business models and innovative ways to crea...
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Speed is not all in Strategic Agility
For me strategic agility will be the by-product of know-how and conceived adaption to new situations or environments. Unlike other who believe that speed is all it takes. Speed will be a by-product of at least two conditions....
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Some Principles for Being Agile
I recommend to consider the following pricnples for being agile:
1. Highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of their requirements.
2. People and management must work together daily throughout the pr...
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Is Agility a Long Term Strategy?
Should agility be treated as a long-term strategy or is it merely one specific way of creating strategies, adaptively adjusting the goals that have been set in before? As a global company, it might be difficult to meet agility and expecting a ...
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Strategic Agility in the Culture
I feel this strategy of agility should be adapted as a culture in the company, where it starts from HR to sales, operation, manufacturing.. Or from workers to CEOs...
This may then be called a true strength of company. Agility is ''openness to n...
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Awareness of the Impact of Agility
To me the adaptation to agility of organizations starts with the awareness of the impact of being agile.
It all started with agile software development in the project environment of a standing organization. However, the standing organizat...
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Strategic Agility Means Speed of Action
The key to agility is speed, quickly acting on and delivering strategies leads to the ability to consider the next strategy, or the new big thing that is going to affect your business. Speed of action is king....
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Strategic Agility Special Interest Group
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 Developing an Agile Top Management Team
Nowadays any company has to be strategically agile -- able to respond and adapt quickly to changing market conditions.
One important but sometimes overlooked aspect of the capabilities and competences a firm should possess to achieve such
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How to Become a Self-tuning Enterprise: Advanced Experimenters
In an HBR article of June 2015, Reeves, Zeng and Venjara argue there's a new way to apply algorithmic principles that enables organizations to constan...
Usage (application): Organizational Agility, Strategic Agility, Real Options, Emergent Strategy
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How to Design Experiments to Support Decision-making on Strategic Innovations
The probability of success of a major innovation is difficult to assess. Statistics and other datasets only provide information about past beha...
Usage (application): Strategic Innovation, Strategic Decision-making, Strategic Experimenting, Experiments, Strategic Testing, Innovation Tes
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Process Steps for Organizational Agility
Organizations that strive for enterprise agility will need to go to various steps in order to achieve it. Korn ferry (2014) define the process of a...
Usage (application): Organizational Agility, Enterprise Agility, Corporate Agility
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Narrative-based Scenario Planning
Traditional scenario-planning generally provides a bigger picture in which trends and shocks are revealed. Such scenarios are effective in detecting t...
Usage (application): Scenario Planning, Strategic Agility, Anti-Fragility
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Entrepreneurial Strategies in Emerging Markets
Chanvatipsakul and Wongsurawat (2013) examined the reasons why SMEs are successful in entering emerging markets while big companies with more resource...
Usage (application): Strategic Agility, Emergent Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Strategic Innovation
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Your Organization Needs to Change its Strategy Implementation Method
Dr. John Kotter explains most clearly how the rate of change of events, technology, globalization, products and markets has gone up almost exponential...
Usage (application): Strategy Execution, Strategic Change, Change Management, Strategy Implementation
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Two Recent Trends in Leadership
Business thought leader John Spence presents 2 important trends in leadership:
- BEHAVORIAL: Spence argues there is a move from
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Organizational Agility and the Role of Information Systems
Presentation about Agility, specifically focusing on the role of IT. The presentation includes the following sections:
1. How do firms compete?
Usage (application): Organizational Agility
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The Essense of Organizational Agility
Giora Morein defines Organizational Agility as an organization's leaderships ability to take advantage of changing conditions and to response in a way...
Usage (application): Organizational Agility, Strategic Agility
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News
Strategic Agility
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Videos
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Presentations
Strategic Agility
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Compare with: Operational Agility | Portfolio Agility | Organizational Agility | Anti-Fragility (Taleb) | Organizational Absorption | Agile Absorption
| Strategic
Risk Management
| Scenario Planning
| Game Theory |
Real Options
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Special Interest Group Leader
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