Strategic Agility by Bettina Büchel and Rhoda Davidson - Preview

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Introduction

Strategic initiatives – exploitative or exploratory endeavors that utilize cross-functional competencies to support the organization’s corporate and business strategy – are usually intended to improve efficiency or boost growth. As such, strategic initiatives are often aimed at improving productivity or building new markets, creating new products. And both types of initiatives are key to an organization’s competitiveness. The purpose of strategic initiatives is to focus strategy execution on exploitation and exploration – both are a high priority for ensuring an organization’s sustainable competitive advantage. They require change and, therefore, risk. As such, they can fail – and often do. However, the potential returns of strategic initiatives are enormous. They can jumpstart growth as well as help an organization achieve economies of scale and scope. Throughout this book, we will focus on how both growth initiatives and business efficiency initiatives can be successfully sequenced through piloting in order to achieve strategic agility. By strategic agility, we mean the capacity to learn and then shift resources – including cash, talent and managerial attention – quickly and effectively. Our hope is that this book will help leaders build their own piloting capabilities, which will allow them to experiment in an agile, low- risk manner and enhance the likelihood that business efficiency and/ or growth strategic initiatives will be successfully scaled and adopted (or killed if the pilot deems they are duds). Chapter 1 explores what constitutes a strategic initiative in a multinational firm and provides a framework for both exploitative business efficiency and exploratory growth initiatives that are either global in nature or may need to be adapted to local environments. We propose that quick learning in the early phase of a strategic initiative is required before fully scaling across multiple locations. Piloting is an essential part of agile execution as it stacks the odds in favor of success.

Chapter 2 discusses the concept of piloting, the goals and business value that can be gained and how these differ by initiative type