By John Caslione in Business strategies, Chaotic Strategies, Climate Change, Economic Analysis, New Normality, Recommendations, Turbulence at May 28th, 2009
I was so pleased to read a brief just released by Economist Intelligence Unit http://www.eiu.com/site_info.asp?info_name=orgagility&page=noads&rf=0. The brief mirrors our own Chaotics formula for success stressing organizational flexibility as key to navigating troubled waters. Organisational agility: how business can survive and thrive in turbulent times examines the challenges and rewards of organisational agility, particularly in tough economic times. Their major findings are:
- Organisational agility is a core differentiator in today’s volatile business environment… 88% of global executives surveyed believe that organisational agility is critical for global business success. One-half of all chief executive officers and chief information officers polled agree that rapid decision-making and execution are not only important, but essential to a company’s competitive standing, particularly in these times of economic uncertainty.
- …Yet most companies admit they are not sufficiently flexible to compete successfully. Although the overwhelming majority of executives view organisational agility as a competitive necessity, actual business readiness is more mixed. More than one-quarter (27%) of respondents say that their organisation is at a competitive disadvantage because it is not agile enough to anticipate fundamental marketplace shifts.
- Internal barriers hamper agile change efforts. More than 80% of survey respondents have undertaken one or more change initiatives in order to improve agility over the past three years, yet 34% say they have failed to deliver the desired benefits. The main obstacles to progress are slow decision-making, conflicting departmental goals and priorities, risk-averse cultures and silo-based information.
- Technology can play an important supporting role in enabling organisations to become more agile. Technology should function as a change agent in the use and adoption of best-in-class knowledge-sharing processes, so companies can improve their use of critical data.
You can download the full report on the EIU website. It is a worthwhile read and reinforces the principles we have outlined in our book.
By John Caslione in Business in Society, Business strategies, Chaotic Strategies, Recommendations at May 21st, 2009
Based upon the recent news in the US about the US Treasury Dept mandating stress tests for US banks (with at least 50 percent of the banks failing the tests), so should Boards of Directors of ALL companies - publicly traded or private, large and small - apply their own stress tests and compel the executive management of their companies to be responsive, robust and resilient - a type of “Chaotics certification”. This is especially compelling as many markets (including the US and the EU) attach personal liability to directors who fail to act responsibly in their duties as directors.
By Chaotics in Business in Society, Recommendations, Turbulence at March 19th, 2009
In a recent review of the book House of Cards by William D. Cohen, the International Herald Tribune writes:
“In March 2008, when the 85-year-old firm Bear Stearns — the United States’ fifth-largest investment bank, which had survived every crisis of the 20th century, from the Great Depression to the market dive of 1987 without a single losing quarter — crashed and burned in little over a week, it became a harbinger of the credit crisis that snowballed later in the year and led to the current global financial meltdown. As William D. Cohan makes clear in his engrossing new book, “House of Cards,” Bear Stearns is also a kind of microcosm of what went wrong on Wall Street — from bad business decisions to a lack of oversight to greedy, arrogant CEOs — and a parable about how the second Gilded Age came slamming to a fast and furious end.”
We’re recommending this book due to its insightful look into the new era we’ve entered, The Age of Turbulence. From the LA Times book review:
“It seems almost achingly quaint to recall those warm and hazy days when “banker” was a synonym for sobriety and propriety — a time when those who worked in finance, as well as those who reported on it, believed that a pinstriped suit connoted one thing and a chalk stripe something else entirely.
Anyone who still retains such antique illusions will lose them in fewer than 10 pages into “House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street,” William D. Cohan’s masterfully reported account of the collapse of Bear Stearns, the investment banking house whose implosion a year ago this month signaled the beginning of the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression.”
Check it out: House of Cards by William D. Cohen.
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