 Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations
Authors: Dr. Steven L. Goldman, Dr. Roger N. Nagel and Dr. Kenneth Preiss
Want the formula for success in today's business world? According to Lee Iacocca and members of the Agile Manufacturing Enterprise Forum (AMEF), agility is the main ingredient. Iacocca and members of the AMEF introduced the concept of agility in 1991, when the team, led by Iacocca, developed a competitive model designed to be a successor to the Japanese leaner model. The model enables companies to achieve success in a rapidly changing environment and explains and validates the increased need for novel approaches to interconnecting human, physical and intellectual resources within and between companies. Three members of the AMEF, Dr. Steven L. Goldman, Dr. Roger N. Nagel and Dr. Kenneth Preiss, documented their finding on agility and its impact on business in Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations; a book endorsed by Iacocca.
The authors begin by defining agility in terms of both a company and an individual. "For a company to be agile is to be capable of operating profitably in a competitive environment of continually, and unpredictably, changing customer opportunities."
"For an individual to be agile is to be capable of contributing to the bottom line of a company that is constantly reorganizing its human and technological resources in response to unpredictably changing customer opportunities."
Throughout the book, the authors stress that an agile company must operate quickly and without the boundaries that exist within and between traditional organizations. This boundary-less concept requires companies to work outside the traditional work paradigm to meet its customer's needs. For example, companies may partner with a competitor to meet the customer's needs and/or eliminate non-value added processes.
For a company to be proactive to new opportunities and react to unanticipated opportunities, it must develop its products more quickly and at a much lower cost. This requires major changes in organization, management philosophy and operations. Businesses need to move from a mass-production environment, where passive workers manage long production runs of uniform products, to an agile competitive environment, where highly motivated workers produce differentiated products with short lifecycles.
Although a precise formula for becoming an agile competitor does not exist, the authors suggest conducting an audit relative to the four strategic dimensions of agile competition. The dimensions include: Enriching the Customer, Cooperating to Enhance Competitiveness, Organizing Master Change and Uncertainty, and Leveraging the Impact of People and Information. Enriching the customer is identified as the most important dimension of agility. Companies can enrich their customers in two ways: lower the customer's costs of operations, inventory or other infrastructure items; or enhance the customer's market penetration, market share or ability to open up new markets.
Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations describes the virtual organization as a tool for agile competitors. It describes the virtual organization as "the business equivalent of all-star teams," identifying the key characteristics of a virtual organization. These characteristics include being the ultimate in adaptability, integrating opportunity-pulled and opportunity-defined core competencies, excelling in core competencies, offering world-class technology, maintaining a synthesized character that is borderless with respect to the customer, and possessing team members who behave in a trusting and trustworthy manner.
Readers of this book will find the coverage on customizing of agile business strategies helpful when dealing with their planning process to develop specific strategies. In addition, a Self-Assessment chapter assists the reader in determining if a company is moving in the right direction -- towards an agile business strategy. A list of useful detailed questions that a company should monitor are also included.
Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations is an excellent tool to educate companies on how achieve success in the 21st century. It identifies the necessity to recognize and act upon the need to move from a mass-production system to agility-based competition. It poses solutions on how to confront the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in an environment of rapid, unprecedented change.
At NYF, we not only recommend this book, but have embraced the agility model. Our ongoing successes are the result of organizing around this customer-specific model and invoking the key agility principles.
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