Management Innovation

Most of what’s been written about Agile assumes that the methodology can be adapted to any organisation. But our analysis found that some companies are better suited to Agile than others. 

We believe these crosscurrents are coming together to propel the next wave of corporate transformation: the ESG transformation. Like digital, ESG has the potential to revamp how successful organisations plan, implement and operate.

As automotive and industrial companies take tactical steps to survive the pandemic, they should seize the opportunity to embrace ten actions to sustain leadership and value creation in the coming decade.

Our research has shown that less than 15% of business ecosystems are sustainable in the long run and that the most prevalent reason for failure is weakness in the governance model—the way the ecosystem is managed.

The author argues that concerns about the perils of short-termism—and support for measures that would insulate corporate leaders from the outside pressures that allegedly make them myopic—are long on alarming rhetoric and short on empirical evidence or economic logic. 

Over the past 40 years … the fitness of the public corporation has been called into question. Critics charge that in today’s far more heavily traded capital markets, the model increasingly incentivizes executives to manage in tiny, short-term windows, with an eager eye on their stock-based compensation and a fearful one on activist hedge funds. 

Amid new forms of competitive differentiation and shifting business boundaries, the potential to build innovative, next-generation businesses at scale has never been greater … An increasing share of the most successful sustained value creators’ market value growth now comes from the future prospects of major new Engine 2 businesses that create internal entrepreneurship and leverage the core’s scale to turbocharge the growth trajectory.

Workforce ecosystems can help leaders better manage changes driven by technological, social, and economic forces… This brief article introduces the concept of workforce ecosystems and discusses how they can help managers rethink the way they align their business and workforce strategies.

If market leaders want to retain their competitive edge, they need to value adaptability over efficiency, become highly skilled in the practices of strategic discovery, and remember there really is nothing more useless than doing the wrong thing right!

CVC [corporate venture capital] can be a good tool for staying current on emerging trends and technologies, identifying growth areas, de-risking M&A, and moving faster than traditional R&D. Companies might consider CVC investing to reap future benefits from new products, technologies and geographies.

Agile is, at its core, in its simplest, a set of team-based working practices… Agile operating models are characterized by rapid learning and decision-making cycles. Here’s how organizations can use agile practices to transform their organizations.

How do strategic leaders create change-adept organizations? Based on qualitative field research, this chapter argues that well-defined institutionalized purpose, values, and principles act as an organizational guidance system that integrates and strengthens the micromechanisms which enable leaders to build dynamic capabilities and, therefore, change-adept organizations.

When environments are complex and dynamic, strategy is about adaptability… Understanding when and how to change is the essence… Tools that help you spot the opportunities and challenges that exist or are emerging in your company’s specific context are now more relevant than the traditional strategy frameworks that rely on the premise of long-run industry stability and competitor benchmarking.

To CEOs, strategic agility is a conundrum. Being strategic evokes peering far into the future, making strong choices and holding firm commitments, unwaveringly deploying resources to implement them, and having every senior executive single-mindedly and individually dedicated to achieving them. In contrast, being agile evokes staying nimble and flexible, open to new evidence, always ready to reassess past choices and change direction in light of new developments, and willing and able to turn on a dime.

Most companies are far better at executing their current activities than at adapting to long-term changes in the business environment. Very few can do both well. Three barriers to adaptability are deeply rooted in the nature of organizations…