Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
How to become and then remain a strategically agile company, 7 May 2008
In their Introduction, Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen assert that strategically agile companies "not only learn to make fast turns and transform themselves without losing momentum but their CEOs and top teams also have higher ambitions: to make their companies permanently, regularly, able to take advantage of change and disruption. They want their organizations to learn to thrive on continuous waves of change, not to periodically and painfully adjust to change, in an alternation of periods of stability and moments of upheaval. Put differently, they want [everyone in] their companies [at all levels and in all areas] to learn a new competitive game: the fast strategy game - a game where nothing can be taken for granted, where no competitive advantage edge may last, where innovation and the constant development of new capabilities are the only sources of advantage."
Doz and Kosonen respond to critically important questions such as these:
What separates winners from losers in this "game"?
How differently are the winners led?
How are they organized?
How do they make decisions?
Answers to these and other questions are revealed during their rigorous examination of exemplary organizations that are most exposed to the challenges of speed and complexity such as Accenture, Canon, Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and SAP. The lessons to be learned from them can be of substantial to all other organizations (regardless of their size and nature) that are currently struggling to formulate and then execute strategies that will enable them to achieve and then - a key word -- sustain decisive competitive advantage. Doz and Kosonen ask their readers to view this process as a "journey" from where their organizations are now to where they hope their change initiatives will take them. Of course, there will be significant barriers along the way, many of them cultural, the result of what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." It is imperative that those who chart the course of this journey also keep in mind what Peter Drucker observed in 1963: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."
For me, some of the most valuable material is provided in Part 3 (Chapters 7-12) as Doz and Kosonen focus on an especially formidable challenge that many of their readers either face now or will soon encounter: Not just to survive and redirect a core business once, but to "weave strategic agility" into your organizational fabric."Tables 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 (Pages 124-126) illustrate the erosion of strategic sensitity(e.g. tunnel vision creates strategic myopia), collective commitment (e.g.silos and bunkers compete for resources), and resource fluidity (e.g. disconnected autonomies that hoard resources) Each of these illustrations has the same format: Driver > Consequence > Toxic Side-Effect. How to avoid or replenish these patterns of erosion? Throughout Part 3, Doz and Kosonen recommend and then explain a number of different strategies and tactics. They have no illusions whatsoever about the difficulties, implications, and possible consequences inherent to regaining strageic agility, once lost. "It is a systemic capability - where many forces have to play in unison - so it can hardly be rebuilt one component at a time. [Meeting the challenge] calls for more difficult ytop management skills and more demanding behaviors. It cannot be delegated by the CEO, but yet needfs to involve all key corporate functions in well-coordinated action...[Moreover], there is not a simple, single recommendation for rebuilding strategic agility - which action sequence to consider, which oath to take are contingent on where a company starts from: sustained momentum or stagnation and inertia."
The remarks with which Doz and Kosonen conclude the final chapter also provide an appropriate conclusion to this review: "Do not evaluate the underlying drivers of strategic agility by their immediate operational value. [In that event], you could discover that you have lost strategic agility when you need it most. Keep on the strategic agility journey, keep the quest going, even when the immediate pay-offs are perhaps disappointing. You will be rewarded."
Bon voyage!
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Corporate Agility co-authored by Charles Grantham, Jim Ware, and Cory Williamson as well as Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat and Competing in a Flat World co-authored by Victor Fung, William Fung, and Yoram (Jerry) Wind. Also Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind, Gary Hamel's The Future of Management, Henry Chesbrough's Open Business Models, Richard Ogle's Smart World, Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect, James Kilts's Doing What Matters, Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement, and Enterprise Architecture As Strategy co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson.
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