In today’s world, everything is accelerating. In fact, acceleration is a monster wave coming the way of every business. Experts say the only way to avoid being submerged by this wave is to transform the traditional leadership model to agile management. The way to do this is to overlay a second management system over the traditional hierarchical approach, with the two working together synergistically. Agile business management is quite different from agile project management, but we can learn a great deal from the experiences in the software business as they transformed to agile project management. In agile business management, business leaders lead by the seven principles of agile business management, with full accountability at all levels and clear, engaged leadership from the top.
In this article, we discuss the key drivers behind the need to adapt agile business management and explain how it works. Understanding what is meant by business agility is just the start. However, this is an essential first step.
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.
in competition with other businesses the business with higher agility will win over its competitors
Quote 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.