WHY AGILE BUSINESS MANAGEMENT NOW?

Acceleration: today the single overriding dominant force in our world

  • Climate change accelerates, Covid accelerates, political development accelerates.
  • Same for businesses: customer needs change faster and faster, sales and marketing accelerate, supply chains accelerate, service of all kinds accelerate, as do our competitors -  to name just a few examples of business processes accelerating.
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    Traditional management can´t cope

    Experts saw this coming already years ago – as for example John Kotter of Harvard Business school in 2012, as did Henry Mintzberg and Claudio Feser of McKinsey.

    Coping with acceleration is now a matter of winning in competition

    in competition with other businesses the business with higher agility will win over its competitors

    The answer is a second management system

    From John Kotter´s article “Accelerate!” in HBR, Nov. 2012:

    • The existing structures and processes that together form an organization’s daily operating system need an additional element to address the challenges produced by mounting complexity and rapid change.
    • The solution is a second operating system, that uses an agile, network like structure and a very different set of processes.”
    • The new operating system identifies key hazards early enough,
    • Formulates strategic initiatives nimbly,
    • Implements initiatives fast enough,
    • And reacts with agility, speed and creativity.

    This new, second operating system is agile business management

    • This is not an “either or” idea,
    • It’s “both”, two systems that operate in concert.