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

Chapter 6. Organization Structure

This chapter focuses on the structure of the enterprise and provides insights on optimizing it for enhancing agility at its structure and consequently at the enterprise level as well.

The structure of an organization is to a business what a skeleton is to a human body. The structure not only defines the shape and form of the enterprise, but it also determines how flexible a enterprise can be in responding to changing circumstances.

For enterprises to have greater agility, they need a structure that enables cross functional and self-organizing teams to deliver value. The structure must be an enabler for teams to develop and sustain all capabilities that underlie agility, namely, responsiveness, versatility, flexibility, resilience, innovativeness, and adaptability. This is radically opposed to a structure that separates the "thinkers" from the "doers," and which is aimed at optimizing efficiency, predictability, and stability.

The chapter will explore the following...