Agility: Competing and Winning in a Tech-Savvy Marketplace

Chapter 9. STARTING OVER TO STAY AHEAD

As we have seen, Agile organizations, more often than not, eventually triumph over organizations that are unable to adapt as quickly and efficiently. If we take responsibility for the future of our organization, taking the steps necessary for improving our agility must be a core element of our strategy.

In the first section of this book, we took a good look at ourselves. As Sun Tzu explained in his Art of War over 2,600 years ago:

So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.

If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.

If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.

An organization that has assessed their own strengths and weaknesses has identified capabilities necessary to sustain and to grow in the environment and benchmarked its processes, costs, and infrastructure capabilities against the leading organizations. Those insights, coupled with key business goals, prioritize the investments and execution focus to be taken.

We discussed how to leverage synergies between IT and business process improvements and how to use the capability improvement project to grow a sustainable, Agile organization. We looked at the typical challenges faced in such a change process and how to overcome them.

So we arrived, didn't we?

Well, competition is a journey. A competitive advantage today is likely to become a common business practice ...