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.

Empowerment Training brings together a vast body of research on topics related to empowerment and general behavioral well-being, summarizing the research findings and providing practical rehabilitation strategies and tactics to address conditioned helplessness and response depression.

Shows how to unlock the massive efficiency savings and productivity gains by reframing the approach to flexible working by concentrating on workforce agility. We know that organizations don’t need the same number of workers 9-5, five days a week 52 weeks a year. We know that not all of the best talent will work when and where we want. We know that command and control Taylorism stifles innovation and creativity. So why do we keep thinking of flexible working as a cost to the organization? A simple mindset shift is all that is required to grasp the opportunity that smart organizations are already exploiting. Stop thinking about “flexible working” and start thinking about “workforce agility”. By creating win-win working practices you can attract the best talent by offering the flexibility they crave and secure the agile, just-in-time workforce that can get the job done. The Agile Future Forum, a business-to-business initiative started by 22 founder members – mostly CEOS of big employers including BT, Lloyds Banking Group, Cisco, Tesco, KPMG, HM Treasury and Ford – have conducted case studies and a collated best practice from world class organisations which show that a more agile approach to flexible working not only delivers better performance but can also save between 3 and 13% of personnel costs. The Agility Mindset blends the insights of scores of CEOs, along with the frontline experience of practising managers to create this very practical guide. Based on rigorous research, but packed with practical diagnostics and frameworks, the book shows you how to create a fit for purpose workplace in a world where only the agile will flourish.

In the last ten years IT has brought fundamental changes to the way the world works. Not only has it increased the speed of operations and communications, but it has also undermined basic assumptions of traditional business models and increased the number of variables. Today, the survival of major corporations is challenged by a world-wide marketplace, international operations, outsourcing, global communities, a changing workforce, security threats, business continuity, web visibility, and customer expectations. Enterprises must constantly adapt or they will be unable to compete. Fred Cummins, an EDS Fellow, presents IT as a key enabler of the agile enterprise. He demonstrates how the convergence of key technologies—including SOA, BPM and emerging enterprise and data models—can be harnessed to transform the enterprise. Cummins mines his 25 years experience to provide IT leaders, as well as enterprise architects and management consultants, with the critical information, skills, and insights they need to partner with management and redesign the enterprise for continuous change. No other book puts IT at the center of this transformation, nor integrates these technologies for this purpose. - Shows how to integrate and deploy critical technologies to foster agility - Details how to design an enterprise architecture that takes full advantage of SOA, BPM, business rules, enterprise information management, business models, and governance - Outlines IT's critical mission in providing an integration infrastructure and key services, while optimizing technology adoption throughout the enterprise - Illustrates concepts with examples and cases from large and small commercial enterprises - Shows how to create systems that recognize and respond to the need for change - Identifies the unique security issues that arise with SOA and shows how to deploy a framework of technologies and processes that address them

XaaS: Everything-as-a-Service: The Lean and Agile Approach to Business Growth takes the reader into the bold new world of pay-per-use for a product or service. From the perspective of the customer, the servitization model yields multiple benefits: the consumer can try out the product/service at a relatively low cost, the risk is mitigated, capital expenses can be converted into operating expenses, it is not needed to forecast how often the product/service is used, and only parts of the product/service needed can be used. Similarly, a provider can benefit by having a larger market coverage, steadier stream of revenues, upgrades as and when needed, sharing of fixed assets across consumers, practicing of value-based pricing, and unbundling or bundling utility for consumers using appropriate pricing techniques. However, this 'nanoization' of products/services is tricky, and has to be designed carefully. This book provides a set of recipes to providers to adopt the XaaS model by changing the provider's mindset: dividing the product/service forces the provider to take a value-driven approach to his product/service, and consequently, eliminate all non-value added activities. The requirements of the XaaS model serve both as an objective to the innovation and internal processes of the provider, and as guide to understanding the customer's needs. The book also covers data acquisition, data analysis and synthesis, and data application needs of the XaaS model, with simple examples and case studies from the business world of firms that achieve these objectives successfully.

As contrary as it sounds, "planning" -- as we traditionally understand the term--can be the worst thing a company can do. Consider that volatile weather events disrupt trusted supply chains, markets, and promised delivery schedules. Ever-shifting geo-political tensions, as well as internal political upheaval within U.S. and global governments, derail long-planned new ventures. Technology failures block opportunities. Competitors suddenly change their product or release date; your team cannot meet the pace of innovations in your market niche, leaving you sidelined. There are myriad ways in the current business environment for a company's well-considered business plans to go awry. Most business schools continue to prepare managers to be effective in stable and predictable environments, conditions that, if they ever existed at all, are long gone. The Agility Shift shows business leaders exactly how to make the radical mindset and strategy shift necessary to create an agile, entrepreneurial organization that can innovate and thrive in complex, ever-changing contexts. As author Pamela Meyer explains, there is much more involved than a reconfiguration of the org chart and job descriptions. It requires relinquishing the illusion of control at the very foundation of most management training and business practice. Despite most leaders' approaches, "Agility is not simply accelerated planning." Unlike many agility books on the market, The Agility Shift provides specific, actionable strategies and tactics for leaders at all levels of the organization to put into practice immediately to improve agility and achieve results.

Senior Leadership Teams and the Agile Organization builds on existing knowledge in the leadership, teams, and strategic management literatures to examine and explore how senior leadership teams drive the dynamic capabilities of organizations. Organizational agility is a key dimension of organizational performance. This volume focuses on senior leadership team processes and attributes that facilitate organizational agility and the organization’s capacity to perform and rapidly pivot in response to shifting strategic demands. Chapters summarize the current state of knowledge, examine past research and theory, define research and theoretical gaps, and consider how to address these gaps. In so doing, they offer an understanding of how senior leadership teams drive and enable organizational activity. The book is essential reading for researchers and professionals looking to understand the intersection of leadership, team dynamics, organizational psychology, organizational psychology, and strategic management, particularly in relation to organizational agility and the senior leadership team.

A research-based approach to achieving long-term profitability in business What does it take to guarantee success and profitability over time? Authors Christopher G. Worley, a senior research scientist, Thomas D. Williams, an executive advisor, and Edward E. Lawler III, one of the country's leading management experts, set out to find the answer. In The Agility Factor: Building Adaptable Organizations for Superior Performance the authors reveal the factors that drive long-term profitability based on the practices of successful companies that have consistently outperformed their peers. Of the 234 large companies across 18 industries that were studied, there were few companies that delivered sustained performance across the board. The authors found that across industries, the most successful companies were not the "usual suspects" found in the media, but companies who possessed a quiet agility that allowed them to quickly perceive and respond to changes so that they could continue to grow. Agility gives organizations the ability to adapt to fluctuations in the environment, test possible responses, and implement changes quickly. This book offers specific, research-based case studies to help organizational leaders use agility to achieve sustained profitability and performance while also becoming more adaptable to a changing marketplace. For executives, leaders, consultants, board members and all those responsible for the long-term health of organizations, this insightful guide outlines: The components of agility for business organizations How to successfully build agility within an organization How agility has its foundation in good management practices How to use agility to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace

Everyone is talking about agility and praising it as THE approach for successful project management. However, many approaches offer hardly any methods for external steering, budgeting, reporting, controlling. Many only cover the development process and leave it to the users to add further parts as needed. This repeatedly leads to the desire for hybrid project management, which combines agile development with project control and planning. However, most hybrid approaches are patchwork. Different philosophies are cobbled together, some of which contradict each other. DSDM® is different here. The method is completely based on agile approaches, but not only covers production, but also offers project planning, project steering and controlling, risk management and reporting with a goal-oriented role and responsibility management. In this booklet, the book author, himself an expert in DSDM® for many years, offers the reader a good overview of the method and shows why many more companies should get to grips with it.

Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation is an in-depth look at transforming businesses so they are fit for purpose in a digitally enabled world. It is a guide for all those needing to better understand, implement and lead digital transformation in the workplace. It sets aside traditional thinking and outdated strategies to explain what steps need to be taken for an organization to become truly agile. It addresses how to build organizational velocity and establish iterative working, remove unnecessary process, embed innovation, map strategy to motivation and develop talent to succeed. Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation provides guidance on how to set the pace and frequency for change and shows how to break old habits and reform the behaviours of a workforce to embed digital transformation, achieve organizational agility and ensure high performance. Full of practical advice, examples and real-life insights from organizational development professionals at the leading edge of digital transformation, this book is an essential guide to building an agile business.