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

Inhibitors to agility


The following factors related to people are key barriers for enterprises seeking to enhance and sustain agility.

Mechanistic view of people

Due to the "hangover" of the industrial era, or because management education is yet to come to terms with knowledge work, many enterprises, especially those led by "old school" leaders, continue to show traces of treating people like machines and cogs in a process. The machine in this context is defined in the traditional sense of a closed-ended system, which is incapable of learning on its own.

The most critical difference between a human and a machine is that a machine is cold and impersonal, while a human has emotions. It is emotions that make a human care and feel the need for appreciation and a sense of belonging, dignity, and respect. It is emotions that create a desire to learn.

If there is a problem in the working of a machine, then the exact faulty part can be easily identified and replaced, without impacting the rest of the...