Fast Strategy: How Strategic Agility Will Help You Stay Ahead of the Game

by Yves Doz, Mikko Kosonen

Successful companies often become victims of their own when their business matures, they find it impossible to renew themselves. To regain and maintain growth they need to learn to thrive on change and disruption. Fast Strategy analyses the risks successful companies face, and presents the three essential capabilities they need in order to regain and maintain continued strategic sensitivity (both the sharpness of perception and the intensity of awareness and attention), resource fluidity (the internal capability to reconfigure business systems and redeploy resources rapidly) and collective commitment (the ability of the top team to make bold decisions –fast, without being bogged in “win-lose” politics at the top). Fast Strategy is based on interviews with 150 executives from leading global companies such as Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and SAP. Measures, tools and leadership behaviours implemented by these companies as they rekindled growth are detailed in a way that can serve as examples and be readily put in practice. Co-authored by a former Nokia top executive and a senior academic, Fast Strategy combines experience and theory for your company to stay ahead of the competition. More information on Fast Strategy and the area of strategic agility can be found on the authors' www.strategicagility.com/

Genres: Business, Management

253 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Ali Marwan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fast Strategy: How Strategic Agility Will Help You Stay Ahead of the Game
Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen
Wharton School Publishing

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fast Strategy: How Strategic Agility Will Help You Stay Ahead of the Game
Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen
Wharton School Publishing

In their Introduction, Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen assert that strategically agile companies "not only learn to make fast turns and transform themselves without losing momentum but their CEOs and top teams also have higher ambitions: to make their companies permanently, regularly, able to take advantage of change and disruption. They want their organizations to learn to thrive on continuous waves of change, not to periodically and painfully adjust to change, in an alternation of periods of stability and moments of upheaval. Put differently, they want [everyone in] their companies [at all levels and in all areas] to learn a new competitive game: the fast strategy game - a game where nothing can be taken for granted, where no competitive advantage edge may last, where innovation and the constant development of new capabilities are the only sources of advantage."

Doz and Kosonen respond to critically important questions such as these:

What separates winners from losers in this fast strategy "game"?
How differently are the winners led?
How are they organized?
How do they make decisions?

Answers to these and other questions are revealed during their rigorous examination of exemplary organizations that are most exposed to the challenges of speed and complexity such as Accenture, Canon, Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and SAP. The lessons to be learned from them can be of substantial to all other organizations (regardless of their size and nature) that are currently struggling to formulate and then execute strategies that will enable them to achieve and then - a key word -- sustain decisive competitive advantage. Doz and Kosonen ask their readers to view this process as a "journey" from where their organizations are now to where they hope their change initiatives will take them. Of course, there will be significant barriers along the way, many of them cultural, the result of what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." It is imperative that those who chart the course of this journey also keep in mind what Peter Drucker observed in 1963: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."

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