Book Image

Enterprise Agility

By : Sunil Mundra
Book Image

Enterprise Agility

By: Sunil Mundra

Overview of this book

The biggest challenge enterprises face today is dealing with fast-paced change in all spheres of business. Enterprise Agility shows how an enterprise can address this challenge head on and thrive in the dynamic environment. Avoiding the mechanistic construction of existing enterprises that focus on predictability and certainty, Enterprise Agility delivers practical advice for responding and adapting to the scale and accelerating pace of disruptive change in the business environment. Agility is a fundamental shift in thinking about how enterprises work to effectively deal with disruptive changes in the business environment. The core belief underlying agility is that enterprises are open and living systems. These living systems, also known as complex adaptive systems (CAS), are ideally suited to deal with change very effectively. Agility is to enterprises what health is to humans. There are some foundational principles that can be broadly applied, but the definition of healthy is very specific to each individual. Enterprise Agility takes a similar approach with regard to agility: it suggests foundational practices to improve the overall health of the body—culture, mindset, and leadership—and the health of its various organs: people, process, governance, structure, technology, and customers. The book also suggests a practical framework to create a plan to enhance agility.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Enterprise Agility
About Packt
Forewords
Endorsements
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Enablers to agility


The following factors related to governance can significantly help enterprises to enhance agility.

Value-driven prioritization

The fast pace of change is creating pressure on enterprises to create new offerings, take them to the market as quickly as possible and keep enhancing them continuously. Due to this, most enterprises are in a situation where there are many initiatives that the organization would like to do, but there are constraints around people and monetary resources that they are able to allocate to these initiatives. Many enterprises make the mistake of treating all initiatives as equally important.

As Patrick Lencioni, the author of the book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team has aptly said:

"If everything is important, then nothing is." [iv]

Lack of prioritization, that is, everything is treated as important, leads to fights among initiative sponsors for getting the people and money for their respective initiatives, which often leads to the more critical initiatives...