The Platform of Agile Management: And the Program to Implement It

Facing the amplitude and the acceleration of changes, management must also change, and it must become alert, adaptable, and agile. The children of the Internet, the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Tesla, are born agile, and they challenge the traditional organizations that have long lost their original agility. The latter may have innovated externally i.e. on the market-oriented part of their organization. Yet, internally their mindset, their models, and their methods have remained tightly trapped in traditional tenets. Confronted with the need for deep changes, an increasing number of business-leaders launch change-management programs, yet, conceived and carried out in traditional ways, up to 70% of them result in partial or total failure.

Management cannot innovate itself, it needs people with the right motivation and with the right mind-set. However, stuck in the old system, people can only keep working in the old ways and means. Thus, the leadership must start by replacing a traditional system with a new and agile one, which will unbridle entrepreneurship.

The Platform of Agile Management and the Program to Implement It combines 3 principles that help to innovate thinking, 3 paradigms to innovate behaviours, and 3 practices to innovate and to accelerate actions. The proposed platform is comprehensive, connective, and congenial. It is implemented with an agile program that combines top down push by the leadership with the bottom up pulled by the people. Then, the proposed platform will generate continuous improvements and innovations of the performance drivers.

Dr. Willy A. Sussland is the author or co-author of well over a half a dozen business books as well as of a string of papers that build on his experiences consulting with the senior management of private and public enterprises; in ascending international positions with multinational corporations based in Europe, in the USA, and in Latin America; lecturing strategic management to post-graduate MBAs at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, and at the University of Geneva.