Becoming Agile

To achieve long-term success, organizations must balance two sets of capabilities - one that delivers on the well-known demands for success today, and a second that insures success in an uncertain future. It requires that executives create strategies and routines that can translate the organization's basic management principles into concrete activities. Once this formal approach is in place, the organization possesses a strategic, long-run view and avoids unwarranted turnarounds from unstable, turbulent, and short-term business pressures. Written by Christopher G. Worley, Véronique Zardet, Marc Bonnet, and Amandine Savall, Becoming Agile outlines a proven approach for developing and sustaining organization agility. Using the SEAM methodology, the successful European company, Brioche Pasquier, built a cross-cultural and international perspective on agility. Step by step, the case study offers insight into how to integrate clear objectives, operational approaches, and implementation activities that best address a change management strategy, contribute to agility, and result in a genuine company identity. The SEAM approach demands that leaders build an integrated management system that goes beyond the usual quantitative objectives, such as meeting budgets, raising market share, reducing waste, or increasing productivity. Together, managers and workers propose tangible and intangible objectives, such as reducing delivery cycles times and clarifying dysfunctions observed by teams in the factories, to improve their professional skills, teamwork, and organization performance. Since independent, stand-alone management tools have proven to be inefficient, the SEAM approach connects and integrates them. As the example of the Brioche Pasquier Group clearly demonstrates, articulating business plans and involving people at work creates lasting value. Long-term business plans, human resource development strategies, product improvement processes, and technical three-year projections are fully integrated with the six-month operating processes that generate actions to be achieved. Teamwork is the key to enabling this holistic and balanced approach. It preserves everyone's functional skills and areas of expertise. For any company that wants to achieve long-term effectiveness, Becoming Agile not only shows how to cope with immediate and exogenous disruptions from the external environment but offers a proven strategy for long-term sustainability.