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

Summary


In this chapter, we learned that governing for greater agility is about optimizing the entire value stream, in order to deliver valuable outcomes aligned to fulfill the purpose of the enterprise. The focus of governance must shift from being on process and compliance, to focusing on inclusiveness and delivering valuable outcomes. The decision-making must be collaborative and must include teams that are directly delivering outcomes. The metrics must enable decision-making by not only measuring progress toward the outcomes but also pointing to variables that can influence the outcomes.

At the company level, governance is about keeping the business on the fine line between order and chaos, that is, on the "edge of chaos" [xiii]. As stated in Chapter 3, The Enterprise as a Living System, complex adaptive systems function best when they are on this edge, in terms of enabling experimentation and learning, and therefore are better equipped to respond and adapt to change.

The next chapter...