Exploiting Agility For Advantage

Many argue that all organisations should strive to be agile. Exploiting Agility for Advantage takes a radically different view. The author’s research shows that requisite agility is required, meaning ‘not too much, not too little, of the right type and delivering wanted agility deliverables’. This is a book for managers who want their enterprise to be intelligently agile but don’t know how to achieve this. Part One shows why agility is a strategic option for commercial and not-for-profit enterprises. Part Two describes, in detail, a seven-step agility-orientated development programme for work-groups or entire organisations. Part Three provides academic underpinning on organisational agility for researchers and students of management. "Agility isn’t easy and developing it is going to need much more than a simple slogan. This book offers very helpful insights into the detailed mechanisms that underpin this capability, and practical guidance around how to build and embed them." (Prof. John Bessant) Author videos: https://vimeo.com/449735611 https://vimeo.com/461491774

This book acts as a valuable quick-access resource on the challenges and opportunities that the digital age presents to organizational leadership. Balanced, comprehensive, and thought-provoking, the book will be useful to professionals and practitioners. The book broadly follows a macro, meso, and micro approach to argumentation and is best read from beginning to end. The book synopsizes the historical context of technological revolutions and reflects on first-order results from enhanced use of information and communication technology in organizations; considers second-level impacts from information and communication technology on economy, society, work, and the very act of organizing; maps out core concepts of agility and principles that leaders should honor to exploit agility in newfound workforce ecosystems; showcases emerging leadership behaviors and mindsets; and specifies the good practice needed to plan and lead digital strategies. The book invites reference to the author's popular Knowledge Solutions: Tools, Methods, and Approaches to Drive Organizational Performance (2017) and the more recent Leading Solutions: Essays in Business Psychology (2021), which it both rests on and extends.

How to win market leadership in a fast-changing world In the past, companies could pick a strategy and stick with it, maintaining a competitive edge for years. But today, companies surge ahead, fall behind, or even disappear in mere months. If you and your company are going to thrive for the long run, you need to continuously evolve, change, and stay a step ahead of your competition. The ability to see and capitalize on new opportunities is the cornerstone of agility. Successful technology-based firms like Google, Tesla, and Amazon have all mastered agility within their core business practices, but companies in any sector can—and must—learn to spot new opportunities and make the right choices about what to invest in, what to change, and what to abandon. The Agility Advantage first shows how to identify those aspects of your business where agility is most crucial—where the business environment is changing fast—and which elements have the greatest impact on the customer’s decision to buy. Amanda Setili then shows how to master the three components of agility: Market agility: Gain ideas from your most demanding and forward-thinking customers and from outside your industry. Engage, observe, and mix with customers to identify the opportunities created by their changing demands. Decision agility: Anticipate the changes that may affect you and turn even troubling trends into opportunities. Design your strategy to maximize learning and to manage risk. Generate diverse alternatives and make fast, fact-based decisions about which to pursue. Execution agility: Build new capabilities, shed what doesn’t fit, and take the first steps in a new direction. Experiment, then reinforce and build on what works. Enlist and inspire your organization around a compelling purpose and grant employees the autonomy and resources to continuously adapt and adjust course. The future will present more opportunities but narrower windows to capture them. With a wealth of valuable information and practical strategies, The Agility Advantage is essential reading to help any organization adapt and thrive—both today and tomorrow.

Investments in research and development are crucial for the innovation process in modern societies. There are more perspectives through which innovation can realize important results, including the knowledge creation source, the digital innovation relative to artificial intelligence (AI), the sustainable transition from traditional technology to renewable technology, and the role of the concept of entrepreneurship linked to innovation. Economic operators need different skills to cope with high degrees of competitiveness and achieve the highest profit levels. The analysis carried out in this book considers the interactions among innovation, sustainability, and entrepreneurship. This in-depth investigation identifies the relevant forces useful for the transformations of modern economies and suggests appropriate support policies.

This book delves into uncharted territory, offering an extensive exploration of the future of organizations and how they should be led. In a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), traditional organizational paradigms no longer suffice. Instead, this book introduces a visionary framework for the leadership of tomorrow's organizations, one that adapts to the unique demands of each situation. Drawing on insights from interviews with 12 subject matter experts, this research-driven work challenges the relevance of twentieth-century leadership styles in the VUCA era. The experts highlight the importance of metagovernance, complexity leadership, and sense-making as essential components of navigating the ever-evolving landscape of modern organizations. Central to this exploration is the question of how to develop a context-specific leadership management framework capable of guiding organizations through simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic contexts. This book not only identifies the pressing need for such a framework but also provides a comprehensive blueprint for its creation. This book is a valuable resource for those who wish to understand the future of organizational leadership and how it can adapt to the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. It not only reshapes the current understanding of leadership but also offers practical insights that will shape the organizations of the future.

In the twenty-first century, there is no single prescription for business strategy development, choice and implementation. The challenges facing firms, not-for-profit organizations and the public sector are significant and call for creativity, inclusivity, diversity and responsibility. The looming and deepening crisis of climate change, imperatives of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and global pandemics, have exposed the risks associated with an exclusive market worldview and the indicators that drive it such as GDP, stock market values, return on investment, executive remuneration, etc. Sustainable Business Strategy augments and challenges existing texts to offer a progressive, challenging, decolonized and plural business strategy curriculum. Andrew Grantham presents existing business strategy theories, tools and techniques, introduces contemporary critiques, and offers fresh thinking about the application of the models and outcomes. The book takes the position that what we know about strategic analysis, choice and implementation needs updating and revision; while there remains a significant role for the market in a healthy, sustainable and future-oriented economy, strategic decisions will be mediated by regulation, broad stakeholder engagement and planetary boundaries. This book is written to be used as a core text for students studying business or corporate strategy at undergraduate and master’s levels. The author uses contemporary examples by way of illustration but seeks to guide readers to investigate the case in greater detail for themselves using references and hyperlinks. Questions and exercise sections in each chapter can be utilized in seminar classes and/or assessments.

As a business leader and strategist it falls to you to make sense of this complicated and turbulent world. You need to respond better and faster than ever before by using new tools and constructs that create higher value, more engagement, and greater longevity for your enterprise. But how are you going to accomplish this? The clear answer is that you and your organization must become agile-focused, fast, and flexible-where the alignment of people, processes, and technology continuously adapt to changing conditions. This capability will enable you to continually anticipate, monitor, and adjust to trends and the new dynamics, so you and your enterprise not only survive but thrive. Authors Nick Horney and Tom O'Shea offer you an approach developed in the course of more than fifteen years of study working with dozens of organizations and thousands of leaders. This research-based "next practice" model frames the essential drivers of organizational agility, identifies the processes that enable each driver, and clarifies the domains and potential outcomes of a serious effort to become agile.

This book sheds light on the emerging research trends in intelligent systems and their applications. It mainly focuses on three different themes, including software engineering, ICT in education, and management information systems. Each chapter contributes to the aforementioned themes by discussing the recent design, developments, and modifications of intelligent systems and their applications.