Search results

Provides lessons in strategic agility from the presentations of two Drucker Forum thought leaders at the annual conference in Vienna in November.

Summarizes the Drucker Forum conference presentations of Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley serial-entrepreneur, and Professor Carlota Pérez.

Blank warns that, “Companies and government organizations are discovering that innovation activities without a defined innovation pipeline are likely to result in innovation theater.” 10; 10;Pérez believes the world has an historic opportunity to turn our environmental problems into economic solutions.

Pérez warns “Business is trapped in the illusion that a minimal state is always best.”

Steve Denning highlights paradigm shifting lessons that Blank and Pérez have to offer managers.

As Agile management thinking spreads to every part and every kind of organization, including their competitors, corporate leaders need to take steps to ensure they get and keep a good seat at the Agile table.

The author’s first hand research finds that firms are learning the hard way that software process and value innovation requires a different way of running the organization to be successful. The whole firm has to become nimble, adaptable and able to adjust on the fly to meet the shifting whims of a marketplace driven by dynamic changes in customer value.

The Agile way of working is provoking a revolution in business that affects almost everyone. Agile organizations are connecting everyone and everything, everywhere, all the time. They are capable of delivering instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale.

Examples of the new way of running organizations are everywhere apparent. It’s not just the five biggest firms by market capitalization: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. It’s also firms like Airbnb, Etsy, Lyft, Menlo Innovations, Netflix, Saab, Samsung, Spotify, Tesla, Uber and Warby Parker.

A new kind of management was needed to enable this new kind of worker -- a fundamentally different way of running organizations. Agile is economically more productive and a better fit with the new marketplace. And it had immense potential benefit for the human spirit. It could create workplaces that enabled human beings to contribute their full talents on something worthwhile and meaningful – creating value for other human beings.

Continuing the management practices and structures of the lumbering industrial giants of the 20th Century is no longer a viable option for today’s firms. To survive, let alone thrive, leaders today must recognize that Agile is not something happening in software alone.

The article explores the leadership strategies of a CEO who defied the odds against culture change and accomplished a storied turnaround, Curt Carlson who introduced a culture of innovation at SRI International.

Under Carlson’s leadership, SRI developed a methodology for rapid, large-scale, serial innovation, starting with a focus on important customer and market needs. The innovation proposals had to develop compelling hypotheses for both the product offering and the business model.

Need, Approach, Benefits per costs and Competition (NABC). the methodology Carlson and his team developed, contains the fundamental framework for creating customer value, it applies to the entire enterprise. It brings all functions together using a short, easy to remember meme that starts every conversation with a focus on customer need.

One of the most spectacular and best-known SRI innovation wins was Siri, the intelligent personal computer assistant and on-line knowledge navigator, an integral part of the iPhone. As a case example, Siri illustrates the power of the NABC approach.

Carlson stresses that the key element in SRI’s success with Siri was not just the technology. It was getting the entire value proposition right. “One of the things that changed at SRI was the realization that we needed to have really solid working hypotheses, both for the product and the business model, before we started spending significant money on technology. That’s one of the biggest mistakes firms make. They rush ahead and want to build the product before they de-risk their value propositions.

The author posits that the management model of an organization determines what kind of business models can be pursued within that organization and that successful 21st century management models are very different from those that succeeded in the 20th century.

The author compares and contrasts successful 21st century management models with models that succeeded in the 20th century.

Success in the digital age requires a 21st century management model and mindset based on an obsession with delivering value to customers.

The management model incorporates the key ‘written and unwritten rules’ of the firm. The success of digital innovation can be threatened by 20th Century management assumptions that thwart Agile initiatives.

Article explains how Agile mindsets and practices are essential to the 21st century management model, and how they potentiate the firm’s focus on creating customers.

“Agile management” refers to a set of management goals, principles, values and practices that emerged to speed up software. Now its tools and culture are spreading to all kinds of organizations throughout the world—from R&D to top management teams. As some corporations race to become “agile” they can lose sight of the essential ideas and practices of Agile methodology

In September 2016, a group of large firms came together in New York to see whether they could agree on what Agile stood for in their own organizations. They aspired to create workplaces that draw on everyone’s creative talents and kindle everyone’s potential in workplaces that respect individuals and are highly productive and profitable. The firms involved were members of the SD Learning Consortium (SDLC)—a non-profit corporation.

As it is being adopted in a wide variety of corporate settings since 2001, the core concept of Agile has evolved.

To be fully entrepreneurial, the whole organization needs to embrace the Agile mindset and function as an interactive network, not a top-down bureaucracy with just a few teams implementing Agile tools and processes.

As Agile is being increasingly adopted by all corporate functions and levels of management it is essential to focus the whole organization on creating value for the customer.

Practitioners can learn much about how a CEO can generate and sustain business agility from examining the role of Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon—arguably the world’s most-agile large organization.

Amazon demonstrates mastery of strategic agility by having successfully shifted Amazon into a whole series of new businesses on a massive scale.

As Amazon acquires new skills, it doesn’t just become more proficient in its own business: it turns these into newly-created capabilities into new businesses.”

For Bezos, the medium-term road map for the future is ‘pretty much all that he works on, delegating the day-to-day business operations to others.’ His job is all about long-term thinking.

This article examines Amazon’s remarkable record of continuous innovation in the light of its Agile mindset. The practices will be illuminating to senior executives seeking to promote an innovation-focused culture in their organizations.

While some large organizations are preoccupied with mastering operational Agility as a way to upgrade existing products and services, they and the wider management community need to realize that the main financial benefits from Agile management will flow from the next frontier: achieving Strategic Agility, a market-making approach to innovation.

The author proposes that firms adopt Agile management as a way to promote market-creating innovations through a process of imagining and delivering something that unexpectedly delights whole new groups of customers, once they realize the possibilities.

The potential of the Agile approach to innovation is that it can revitalize mature companies by discovering new customer experiences and create products and services that fulfill unmet needs.

This article shows how Agile management and strategic management concepts like “Jobs to be done” theory and “Blue Ocean” strategy can merge to promote market-creating innovation.

Given that industry borders are dissolving and competition is more dynamic than ever, the need for Strategic Agility – speedy, customer focused innovation that aims to make markets–is becoming increasingly obvious. This confluence of Agile and strategic management is a new and exciting approach to innovation.

Describes how Agile teams can use strategic management tools and processes to discover market-creating innovations.

The related article “The next frontier for Agile: strategic management” in the previous issue of Strategy & Leadership explored the theory and possibilities of enterprise-wide Strategic Agility, a combination of Agile mindset and processes with strategic management theory to produce continuous market-creating innovation. This second installment offers insights from noted practitioners about implementing it.

The strategic concepts of Kim & Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy, Clayton Christensen’s Job to Be Done theory and Curt Carlson’s SRI Playbook – Need, Approach, Benefits per costs and Competition (NABC) can be adopted by Agile teams seeking innovations that create new customer value.

Identifying a well-defined Job to Be Done produces the start of an innovation blueprint which is unlike the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because of the much higher degree of specificity required to identify precisely what problem your potential solution would address.

Using strategic management concepts, Agile teams can redefine how needs are being met and in the process, discover value for customers from offering something or doing something that the company or the industry currently doesn’t provide.

With Agile’s success in accelerating software products and services that customers valued and with the increasing importance of software in general business strategy, business leaders are increasingly turning to Agile for every aspect of their operations.

There are more than 70 different Agile practices. The author advises traditional managers on how to make sense of such a bewildering assortment of ideas.

His research found thatrganizations that have embraced Agile practice three core principles–The Law of the Small Team; The Law of the Customer; The Law of the Network.

The first and almost universal characteristic of Agile organizations is that practitioners share a mindset that work should be done in small autonomous cross-functional teams working in short cycles on relatively small tasks that deliver value to customers and getting continuous feedback from the ultimate customers or end users.

As a network, the organization becomes a growing, learning, adapting organism that is in constant flux to exploit new opportunities and add new value for customers. The future of Agile is ultimately about implementing the third principle: the whole organization operating as an interactive network. In the rapidly evolving “Connected Economy” the power of the network is increasing geometrically.

As senior executives increasingly explore Agile management in their operations they are discovering that their practices in managing people also require transformation.

The article, with an attached case, explores how some leading companies are radically changing their HR practices to prioritize fostering talent that adds customer value and champion the work experience of their talent. The article explains why transformation will involve, not merely HR process improvements, but a fundamentally different kind of management. It offers a case to illustrate new approaches.

At a time when talent is in such high demand, you must allow—and even encourage—people to have their say if you hope to attract the very best in your field. So, the successful deployment of talent is now largely a matter of creating an environment where the interests, ambitions and innovations of people constantly shape the strategy and future of the company.

Instead of strategy gurus telling talent what to do, now talent needs to play a central role in strategy formulation. Imagine a company divided into some two hundred customer-facing units, each with its own pay scale and work methods, each so talent-driven that employees are given the right to fire their unit leader?

The shift from a strategy-led company to a talent-first company requires fundamental changes in the way CEOs understand the very concept of management—it’s the beginning of a new age.