The Agility Factor: Building Adaptable Organizations for Superior Performance

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in organizational performance. It brings theory, research and practice together in an interesting and insightful way. The corporate cases are well written and provide valuable knowledge into how organizations can become more agile.The authors undertook a careful 30 year analysis of corporate profitability that demonstrates why the highest profits often are not always the best profits. All too often they are achieved in ways that destroy corporate agility and ultimately profitability. The authors do a first rate job of explaining how organizations can combine high levels of agility and profitability to maximize organizational performance.Overall I found "The Agility Factor: Building Adaptable Organizations for Superior Performance" to be a very engaging and insightful analysis of corporate performance. It is the best book on the subject that I have read in years. I will never think about how organizations should be designed and managed in the same way again.

Awesome book, I wish I had read this years ago!

Great book!

First, it's nice to see the empirical research and the care that went into determining which firms really were high performing; the fact that this list doesn't match the one Jim Collins used for Good to Great raises the debate a notch.Of all the ideas the one that most grabbed me was "test and implement" which sounds straightforward, but the dominant practice with most groups of people (including businesses) is to argue "that'll never work" rather than "let's try something and learn from the test." It's easy to read without being facile and short enough that it won't bog you down.

I focused on agile organisations and agility for my dissertation for my EMBA. Agile, agility is the management buzzword of today. After reading many papers and many books I found it a challenge to narrow to a meaningful definition that I could make relevant and actionable. Agility is like employee engagement, or communication, or change in that organisations say they need to get better at it without really defining what the definition is or what better looks like. This book provides some great insights and a framework for measuring agility in an organisation. I found it extremely useful to use (together with Cameron and Quinn's excellent Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture) to analyse my organisations agility and where it needed to focus to improve. There is so much rubbish out there which throws everything under the agility umbrella that it was refreshing to see a book that presents a focused view of how to measure.I should also add that I was lucky enough to be able to discuss my findings of my MBA research directly with Christopher Worley. A great conversation which helped challenge my thinking. I ended up with a Distinction on my final dissertation. I will recommend this book to anyone and everyone who wants to be able to diagnose agility.

Comment développer la capacité des organisations à réagir avec succès aux évolutions de son environnement ? Cet ouvrage en propose un panorama complet, appuyé sur des études de cas détaillées. Ce livre aborde les processus clés de l'agilité : clarifier l'intention stratégique, se tenir à l'écoute de l'environnement, tester et mettre en œuvre. Une approche qui se veut exhaustive, illustrée de références détaillées.