Cambridge Scholars Publishing Agile Strategies for the 21st Century: The Need for Speed

Designing agile organizations fit for a dynamic, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world has become a necessary skill for successful 21st century leaders. This book provides a summary of many classical strategic management techniques, before introducing the reader to emergent concepts that are more in tune with the VUCA environment. It explains how the culture defines an environment that either enables or inhibits the creation of new knowledge which translates into innovation and fast, effective decision-making. The name of the game here is speed. As such, this book provides a practical framework for leaders or managers to build agile organizations designed to accelerate innovation and adaptability. Successful executives must rapidly identify many “unseen, and rarely discussed” interferences that creep into the culture of an organization that disrupt the flow of critical knowledge. Executives worldwide must quickly identify those unseen viruses within their organizations so they can take targeted action to fix the root problem rather than just try a “flavor of the month” approach. They need a way to diagnose underlying root causes of cultural infections, and the diagnostic mentoring methodology described here provides a practical way for executives to do just that.