Organizational Agility

January 27, 2017

I am excited to be settling into my new role as Chair of AICC and, through my initial travels, I have been constantly reminded of the incredible people who make up this industry! Although I have a bit of an aggressive schedule ahead of me, I remain excited to meet as many of you as I can, learn as much as I am able, and hopefully evangelize the benefits of my theme—principled leadership.

A principled leader is one who makes decisions framed by what they hold as immutable truths based on their core values. While we each possess our own core values, we need to be reminded that it is OK to profess them and encourage others to live them rather than just keep them inside.

In my first letter, I talked about one of five pillars of principled leadership: integrity. Now, I would like to concentrate on our second pillar of principled leadership: agility. My company learned to define agility as: “Act quickly and decisively to create killer solutions that make raving fans of our external and internal customers.” To complement our definition, a quick Google search for “organizational agility” yields: “The capability of a company to rapidly change or adapt in response to changes in the market.

An organization with a high degree of organizational agility can help a company to react successfully to the emergence of new competitors, the development of new industry-changing technologies, or sudden shifts in overall market conditions.”

As you will most certainly appreciate, this issue of BoxScore is dedicated primarily to technology and innovation. Most will agree that a company’s organizational agility with respect to both of these is critical to its longevity.

Too much organizational flexibility may lead to a company taking too long to make critical decisions and changes that possibly lead to a lack of focus, or maybe even overanalyzing a situation to the point of “analysis paralysis.” Conversely, too much organizational rigidity may lead the company to be stuck in the way things have always been done—perhaps mired in a bureaucracy of red tape, processes, systems, procedures, etc.

The point of all of this is that a company’s ability to foster a culture of innovation and calculating when it is appropriate to invest in technology can be the key pivot point of a company’s agility. And the company’s ability to respond in a timely fashion will almost always benefit the organization in the long term.

I very much look forward to meeting with you and learning about your innovations and how you have embraced the new technologies available to our industry.