Organizational Agility in Practice
A research initiative by ECSI and Thinkers50
About the Research
ECSI and Thinkers50 teamed up to develop this White Paper on Organizational Agility, a research initiative on the adoption of agile for organizational design and transformation.
The analysis and recommendations in this report combine valuable insights from the world’s leading management thinkers and practitioners, with ECSI’s experience working with pioneers who have embraced a full-agile organizational transformation, and on extensive literature review.
Foreword by Stuart Crainer
In the twentieth-century the organizational focus was on size and efficiency, economies of scale. Corporations became huge sprawling global organizations which could produce goods in astonishing numbers at a highly consistent quality. The zenith of this was the concept of zero defects which was one of the big management ideas of the tail-end of the century.
Mass production, the creation of the modern global corporation and high-quality manufacturing were formidable achievements. They should not be dismissed, but time moves on and so, too, does organizational best practice. We have moved from the era of zero defects to one of what Zhang Ruimin, the inspirational CEO of the Chinese company Haier, calls, “zero distance”. Technology has broken down barriers between producer and consumer. The better we understand and respond to this new reality, the better placed we will be.
To achieve zero distance with your customers requires a very different sort of organization: one that is fundamentally agile in its thinking and activities; one that is willing to change and able to change as consumers and markets dictate. Agility is the new organizational benchmark. Join us in exploring what this means not just in theory, but in best practice.
Organizational Agility Insights
Watch full interviews with leading thinkers on how organizations can successfully become agile, what barriers organizations face, and more.
Alessandro Di Fiore
Rita McGrath
Stew Friedman
Julian Birkinshaw
Dorie Clark
Howard Sublett
Karolin Frankenberger
Raymond Hoffman
Alexandra Levit
Marcio Souza
