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

What is culture?


Organization culture as a topic has been widely taught and researched by academics and specialist practitioners for decades. Yet, like mindset, there is no universally accepted definition of culture. Some popular definitions are as follow.

Edgar Schien, a former professor at MIT Sloan School of Management says:

"A pattern of shared basic assumptions that a group has learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems". [vi]

Geert Hofstede, a professor and expert in organizational anthropology and international management at Maastricht University states:

"Organizational culture is defined as the way in which members of an organization relate to each other, their work and the outside world in comparison to other organizations. It can enable or hinder an organization's strategy....