Fast Strategy: How Strategic Agility Will Help You Stay Ahead of the Game

A great read. Well thought out and researched. Nice clear structure & I would love to say intuitive, but Doz & Kosonen are quite original in their work.Think about any industry using their "Curse of success" framework and you will have a challenge.

In their Introduction, Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen assert that strategically agile companies "not only learn to make fast turns and transform themselves without losing momentum but their CEOs and top teams also have higher ambitions: to make their companies permanently, regularly, able to take advantage of change and disruption. They want their organizations to learn to thrive on continuous waves of change, not to periodically and painfully adjust to change, in an alternation of periods of stability and moments of upheaval. Put differently, they want [everyone in] their companies [at all levels and in all areas] to learn a new competitive game: the fast strategy game - a game where nothing can be taken for granted, where no competitive advantage edge may last, where innovation and the constant development of new capabilities are the only sources of advantage." Doz and Kosonen respond to critically important questions such as these: What separates winners from losers in this "game"? How differently are the winners led? How are they organized? How do they make decisions? Answers to these and other questions are revealed during their rigorous examination of exemplary organizations that are most exposed to the challenges of speed and complexity such as Accenture, Canon, Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and SAP. The lessons to be learned from them can be of substantial to all other organizations (regardless of their size and nature) that are currently struggling to formulate and then execute strategies that will enable them to achieve and then - a key word -- sustain decisive competitive advantage. Doz and Kosonen ask their readers to view this process as a "journey" from where their organizations are now to where they hope their change initiatives will take them. Of course, there will be significant barriers along the way, many of them cultural, the result of what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." It is imperative that those who chart the course of this journey also keep in mind what Peter Drucker observed in 1963: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all." For me, some of the most valuable material is provided in Part 3 (Chapters 7-12) as Doz and Kosonen focus on an especially formidable challenge that many of their readers either face now or will soon encounter: Not just to survive and redirect a core business once, but to "weave strategic agility" into your organizational fabric."Tables 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 (Pages 124-126) illustrate the erosion of strategic sensitity(e.g. tunnel vision creates strategic myopia), collective commitment (e.g.silos and bunkers compete for resources), and resource fluidity (e.g. disconnected autonomies that hoard resources) Each of these illustrations has the same format: Driver > Consequence > Toxic Side-Effect. How to avoid or replenish these patterns of erosion? Throughout Part 3, Doz and Kosonen