The Agility Factor: Building Adaptable Organizations for Superior Performance

CHAPTER 5Transforming to Agility

It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

—Publilius Syrus, first century b.c.

In our research, organizations that possess the routines of agility—strategizing, perceiving, testing, and implementing—consistently outperformed their industry peers over long periods of time. Organizations that did not have these routines exhibited profit performance patterns that either thrashed about the industry mean as they were buffeted by environmental forces or chronically underperformed the industry mean as if their energies were spent. In our financial database of 424 firms, only 18 percent of them could meet the 80-percent standard of above-average profitability, and in our survey database, where we tried to find ...