Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age

Postface

Postfaces are an ambiguous genre, almost a false one. While a foreword may announce the book, underline its strong ideas, salute the intellectual advance that it promotes, serve as a frame and praise the thought of the author, the writer of a postface risks being exposed to ridicule as someone trying to substitute themselves for the reader who has come to the end of the book, daring to say what they should think of it while the reader, whoever they are, has already decided what they think of it and the reasons for that opinion.

In contrast, the writer of a postface, by giving their point of view on what they have taken from their own reading, may help some readers, whether the latter agrees or not with the opinions given, to further open and deepen new debates.

From Soufyane Frimousse’s formidably dense, original and inspiring book, I would like to extract five major points which particularly spoke to me:

• – There is first this permanent reminder: management is not a science. It is a praxis that depends on many fluctuating elements which interact with each other; management means ensuring that in a shifting external context and within a given type of organization, the employees available – such as they are – are led to sustainably produce the expected results. This thus firstly depends on the degree of VUCA (according to the US Army’s acronym: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) of the organization’s environment in which management must operate; this also ...