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Executive Education

Adopting an agile mindset and approach

In our highly competitive and rapidly changing economic environment, developing agility has become a key issue for companies throughout the world. In the words of Bill Gates: “Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react and reinvent.”

Agility banner (bis)

For Professor Lehmann Ortega, a defining trait of agile organizations is their “test, trial and error approach.” Team members are empowered to formulate their own solutions rather relying on their bosses for ready-made answers. This is one of the main differences between agile organizations and command-and-control organizations. “When employees move from a bring-me-the-answer to a solution-finding mindset, they have to be more agile, creative and innovative.”


Successful agile companies know how to develop a culture that is open to change, that empowers people to collaborate in self-organizing teams and that welcomes diverse ideas. As Professor Lehmann Ortega points out, the most agile and innovative and teams “look at the world with different eyes.” By challenging existing industry recipes, they enable organizations to increase competitive advantage, improve performance and generate growth.


An agile mindset and innovation go hand in hand. For Professor Lehmann Ortega “one of the key benefits of agile structures is that people have more ideas.” They understand and embrace the test and learn approach. The more they test, the more they learn, which in turn makes them more agile and innovative.


Michelin offers an excellent example of innovation through agility, says Professor Lehmann Ortega. The tire giant, for example, successfully transformed its sales and operations planning processes by moving towards designing, constructing, testing and validating solutions in intense three-week periods called “sprints.”


Successful companies know that true agility rarely “happens from one day to the next,” concludes Professor Lehmann Ortega. When the approach clicks into place, however, continuous innovation and agility are within reach.

 

Laurence Lemhan Ortega vignette

Laurence Lehmann Ortega

 

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