Strategic agility explanation

In the first video tutorial introducing strategic agility, he asserts that traditional management models of creating a long-term vision are flawed since our knowledge of the future is always imperfect and marketplace conditions are changing continuously.

Rather than being the captain of a ship surveying the far horizon, analogous with the top down model of strategy, the reality for managers is that their situation is more akin to a racing car drive on a foggy day, constantly looking to take the right decisions based on the mass of information about their surroundings coming through the fog.

He believes that having a clear long-term vision, particularly where it isn’t based on environment analysis. Instead he says that companies should “Keep vision fuzzy but current priorities clear”. He gives the example of the failure of Microsoft to respond sufficiently fast to the growth of the Internet.

Marketplace evaluation for strategic agility

In this second video tutorial explaining reconnaissance or environment scanning , he explains the basis for strategic agility. He explains that all knowledge of the future is based on uncertainty, but that managers must act now so they need to put in place reconnaissance missions as an army would in order to make their battle plans.

He gives the example of Dell, explaining how they spend relatively little in research and development, but are instead constantly probing the marketplace, trialling new ideas with multiple probes into the approach. He stresses the importance of finding anomalies in the marketplace where it doesn’t appear as expected and these may represent learnings or opportunities.

Detailed customer insights and business performance is necessary to identify these anomalies. Finally he makes the point of the need to act rapidly to have scalability to “swarm the gap in the defences of the enemy” where there is a strong opportunity.

Implications for Internet marketing strategy development

In a digital marketing context, we can see that strategic agility requires these characteristics and requirements for an organization to be successful in its strategy development:

• 1. Efficient collection, dissemination and evaluation of different information sources from the micro and macro-environment.
• 2. Efficient process for generating new strategies based on creating new value for customers.
• 3. Efficient research into potential customer value against the business value generated.
• 4. Efficient implementation of prototype of new functionality to deliver customer value
• 5. Efficient measurement and review of results from prototypes to revise further to improve proposition or to end trial.