The Four Keys You Need know To Achieve Strategic Agility

Narendra Kumar

09 Sep, 2019

The term “agility” expressed in Latin as “agility” and translates literally as the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly (intellectual acuity) was first used in the parliamentary proceedings of the House of Lords in Britain before Lord Hinton between 1737-1738 in the 18th century.

Agility means an ability to move about quickly and easily. The concept of strategic agility describes a business’s ability to remain fluid, changing and updating operations as innovations become available. In this lesson, we look at how strategic agility applies to the development of new products and services.

The proposition examines the influence of dynamic abilities on tactical agility in a dynamic industry. The study considers what types of abilities motivation strategic agility of the case companies and in what ways. The study is connected to the theoretical discussions on planned agility and self-motivated competences in the field of strategic management, also connecting to issues in international business and management.

Concept:

Strategic agility is an organization’s ability to think ahead of the market, quickly mobilize itself, adapt to market shifts, fill capability gaps, capture new revenue ahead of the competition, and even create new markets. Strategic agility requires going remote of arrangements, buildings, and processes, and allowing the fluid organization of teams to achieve loosely defined missions. It is an innovation playground.

What is Strategic Agility?

The ability to continuously adjust and adapt strategic direction in the core business, as a function of strategic ambitions and changing circumstances, and create not just new product and services, but also new business models and innovative ways to create value for a company.

Key Enabling Capabilities:

• Strategic Sensitivity: both the sharpness of perception and the intensity of awareness and attention,
• Resource Fluidity: the internal capability to reconfigure business systems and redeploy resources rapidly,
• Collective Commitment: the aptitude of the top team to make bold decisions –fast, minus being bogged in “win-lose” politics at the top.

Strategic Agility – why now?

Companies have usually responded to change finished strategic preparation and the forethought offered by scenarios, or through corporate ventures and an entrepreneurial drive. Today’s change is both fast –where ventures can provide an answer- but also complex (in the sense that it results from multiple hard to forecast systemic interactions). Strategic planning no longer fits because change is fast and unpredictable. so, does the need for strategic agility.

To Develop the Skill of Strategic Thinking in your Organization:

• Focus on a target.
• Ask the right questions.
• Balance the big picture and the details along the way.
• Explore new channels.
• Teach strategic thinking skills.
• Stage your field of vision.

Strategic agility is a developed type of agility that in addition to rapid response pays specific attention to strategic aspects and predicting changes in the environment^[1] before they occur.

Four Keys to Creating Market-Creating Value Propositions

1. Identify the Need

It begins with a focus on outcomes and the potential customer’s need, not the firm’s need as an innovator, or a shareholder’s need for financial returns. “Does the customer have a need for something?”

• Understand non-customers: “Obviously, the first port of call should be the customers,” write the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy. “But you should not stop there.
• Study markets: Although there is a lot of attention to global markets, for example in smartphones, most markets are fragmented into narrow segments. It can be a mistake to chase a single narrow market niche.
• Operating at scale: A firm also needs to have the capabilities to operate at scale. When Apple made its move into mobile phones, suddenly they had to have an enormous transaction engine capable of dealing with billions of transactions in a year.
• Think big: Innovation pioneer Peter Thiel in his book, Zero to One, sees the principal task of business as essentially one of creating an enduring monopoly through breakthrough technology. The technology has the capacity to generate a very large future cash flow. LinkedIn^[2] and Twitter^[3] are valued highly, not because of any incomes today, but since they are supposed as having the size to generate massive cash flow over the coming decades. “The overwhelming importance of future profits is counter-intuitive even in Silicon Valley.

1. Clarify the Approach
2. The Benefits per Costs (for both the customer and the producer)
3. Identifying the Competition and Alternatives