Focused, Fast and Flexible: Creating Agility Advantage in a VUCA World

by Tom O'Shea, Nick Horney

As a business leader and strategist it falls to you to make sense of this complicated and turbulent world. You need to respond better and faster than ever before by using new tools and constructs that create higher value, more engagement, and greater longevity for your enterprise. But how are you going to accomplish this? The clear answer is that you and your organization must become agile—focused, fast, and flexible—where the alignment of people, processes, and technology continuously adapt to changing conditions. This capability will enable you to continually anticipate, monitor, and adjust to trends and the new dynamics, so you and your enterprise not only survive but thrive.

Authors Nick Horney and Tom O'Shea offer you an approach developed in the course of more than fifteen years of study working with dozens of organizations and thousands of leaders. This research-based “next practice” model frames the essential drivers of organizational agility, identifies the processes that enable each driver, and clarifies the domains and potential outcomes of a serious effort to become agile.

204 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 15, 2015

Reviews

[Michael MacDonald · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an assigned reading for a course. I completely appreciate the intent behind this, but I remain unconvinced that senior leaders will actually take the time needed to sit down and consider this model of tackling problems.

Many of the concepts are intangible and ethereal - it offers interesting perspectives for examining the unknown issues that may or may not crop up on your radar in the business community.

I used the model to better understand the pandemic's impact on the aviation sector, and how employee mental health might be affected and found that it provides a structure for approaching uncomfortable uncertainties. For those out there that have an insatiable need to plan and control for the future, this might be a book for you. It's a source of imagined control that might be reassuring for some.

For me, it was an interesting intellectual exercise that I'll likely not revisit again in my career.

[Robert Bogue]

Finding a way to navigate our ever-changing world is challenging to say the least. We live in unprecedented times of change. We’re facing more competition from across the globe and individual entrepreneurs who are leveraging the latest cloud and artificial intelligence options to compete with organizations of every size. To compete in today’s world, we need something like Focused, Fast, and Flexible: Creating Agility Advantage in a VUCA World.

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[Manoj Joshi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have been a better academic work

[Walt Pilcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wouldn’t you have a wonderful advantage if you could see into the future and accurately anticipate changes that will inevitably happen? By adopting The Agile Model in Focused, Fast & Flexible you can do better than that and be more than ready when your future arrives, and keeps arriving, and arriving. Honed and validated over many years of practical experience and proven effectiveness by no-nonsense business people, The Agile Model is both comprehensive and detailed yet always with a view toward the bigger picture. Focused, Fast & Flexible is well organized, easy to read, and full of real life examples. With its guidance, you see the trees and the forest as you sharpen and sustain your company’s winning edge.
Walt Pilcher, former CEO of L’eggs® Products and Kayser-Roth Corporation and author of The Five-fold Effect: Unlocking Power Leadership for Amazing Results in Your Organization