Business Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World

Chapter 5. Strategically Focused, Tactically Responsive

Use the principles of the responsive organization to structure your company's operations; apply the lessons of speed, simplicity, and boldness to guide your actions; and what emerges is a business model that delivers alpha profits on a consistent basis. Let's explore this business model in a bit more depth. To do this we will use the three process loops presented in Chapter 3—Awareness, Balance, and Agility—to organize our discussion.

These three loops apply to running individual business units just as well as they apply to running a whole organization. I used the three feedback loops to run the information systems group of a multibillion-dollar distribution cooperative. We became the focused and responsive group that developed and operated the systems infrastructure that enabled our company to transform its business model from an old-line distributor to a value-added provider of products and supply chain services.

AWARENESS DRIVES EFFECTIVE STRATEGY (LOOP 1)

John Boyd described strategy as "a mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts; as a basis for realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforeseen world; of many bewildering events and many contending interests."^[59]

The purpose of Loop 1 is to create that ever-changing mental tapestry and deliver business success. The four steps of the OODA Loop create an awareness of changing market conditions and internal operations. All ...