LEADERSHIP: YOUR KEY TO ORGANISATIONAL AGILITY

What would you give to achieve higher revenues, more satisfied customers and employees, improved operational efficiency and a faster time to market? That's what Donald Sull of McKinsey & Company offers if you achieve organisational agility. He defines it as identifying and capturing opportunities more quickly than your rivals. He quotes the heightened volatility of recent decades - and the acceleration during the GFC. But, what does this mean for you as a leader? Here are some thoughts.

Sull's strength is in his simple, three-way split. Strategic agility is about "spotting and seizing game-changing opportunities" - as Apple did with its iPod. Portfolio agility shifts "cash, talent and managerial attention" as Jack Welch did by dumping GE's low-potential businesses. And, operational agility is about exploiting "opportunities within a focused business model" as Zara, the Spanish retailer, does by mining real-time market data. Powerful ideas and telling examples.

A weakness, though, is Sull's failure to concretise this for those of us, who operate below the Olympian levels of global business. What do his ideas mean for you and me as leaders over the coming twelve months? Here are six actions I'd suggest.

• Monitor changes in your marketplace: both minor and mega trends impacting industry structure and hence specific opportunities, threats and options
• Seek diversity of input: casting wider than your established sources (of people and media), keeping an open mind and looking for new perspectives
• Identify new drivers of competitive advantage: that will flow for the above and work out what they mean for your business or division
• Rethink strategy: exploring new visions and different ways of reaching old ones - finding possibilities that could fuel a quantum lift in positioning or performance
• Find and embed operational innovation: that provides a level of excellence in current operations to put your business ahead of the rest
• Take tough decisions: that give effect to what needs doing

Except in fairytales, success is not the result of a single stroke. It's about stamina and perseverance: executing a suite of strategies tempered by watchfulness and readjustment. Sull can start us thinking. Only we can decide the leadership actions.

Categories for this Potshot:

McKinsey articles, Great-leader Potshots, Monitor and shape change, Understand your marketplace, Build competitive advantage, Drive strategic rethink, Embed innovation, Take tough decisions,

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