Agilization: The Regeneration of Competitiveness

The idea of business agility is not new, but the commonly held understanding of agility supports the notion that it's ultimately about processes, and that processes must 'flex' to respond to changes in business requirements. But business processes are often locked into inflexible organisational structures that evolve over time and largely echo management thinking; probably formed around management priorities that at some point in time met a prevailing market need. The risk is, that by jumping to the belief that agility is about 'processes', the internal procedural manual, the way the organisation approaches new opportunities and threats, the way managers are trained to think, how the organisation structures its resources to achieves its desired outcomes - all of these factors that are key to the success of organisations in the 21st century remain unchanged. (It is ironically the case that sometimes greater formality in processes can improve the agility of organisations!).
The term 'Agilization' defines the process of transforming enterprise behaviour from one form, modelled by 20th century corporations, to another that meets the competitive imperative of organizations of the 21st century to always fit their most profitable markets. "Agilization - The Regeneration of Competitiveness" explores how society is changing the environment that commerce operates within. The book goes on to describe a new way of working and thinking that will come to characterise behaviours of successful corporations in the 21st Century. Leaders will encourage the adoption of these new behaviours because they want to achieve sustainable growth in highly competitive markets. We are fast approaching the tipping point when the attitudes and behaviors of the 20th Century enterprise are no longer sustainable. Captains of industry can not hope to be successful by closing their eyes to the external environment and hoping that the sea remains like a duck pond, that obstacles will not interfere with the progress of the ship or that the destination doesn't move. Society itself is changing rapidly. The business environment is in a constant state of flux.
We live in the 24-hour, global markets of the digital 'participative' age. These conditions are creating new market dynamics. In response, business models must change ever more rapidly. The 'agilized' enterprise is the only enterprise behaviour that promises sustainable profit growth in the hyper-competitive markets of the 21st century.