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44 INDIAN MANAGEMENT NOVEMBER 2015
Simplistic understandings of agility can be limiting. Organisations can realise its strategic potential by using visionary intelligence. Baba Prasad, Author, Nimble interview Survival of the nimblest One of the basic principles of Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management was ‘for each elemental task of an organisation there should be one best way found.’ Does this principle still hold true for shop floor management? Companies benefited from optimisation because the world was less unpredictable in the 1980s. Today, you have to be flexible in order to handle unexpected change. So there is a struggle between efficiency and flexibility. To be flexible, you must build redundancy—that is, you must have other ways of doing things beyond the ‘one best way’— which goes against the grain of efficiency. There is a trade-off between efficiency and flexibility. And so, while efficiency is important, a focus on just efficiency will not work in today’s uncertain environments. As I see it, the Taylorian model should not be discarded, but applied in context. Given the need for agility and changing benchmarks, how will companies understand and zero in on what will work for them and give them an edge? A key paradigm shift is required for companies in these turbulent environments. We need to recognise that agility has to be built into the organisation holistically—into people, processes, and structures. The history of humankind shows that our species, Homo sapiens, has weathered all kinds of calamities through the millennia; the key to its success is the word ‘sapiens’—Latin for intelligence, wisdom. Intelligence is the driver of agility. And by intelligence, I go beyond IQ—intelligence generates the ability to respond quickly to change. My research, which began when I was at Wharton School and continued when I was a faculty member at the business schools at Purdue University and the University of Minnesota, has shown that we need to develop five different intelligences in the organisation that drive five corresponding agilities. The intelligences framework—discussed in Nimble—comes with an associated tool that a company’s senior management can use to assess across five dimensions what kinds of agility are being demanded from their company, and how equipped the company is to deal with these demands. The use of this tool will help them assess and develop multiple agilities, and gain strategic and competitive advantage in a turbulent world. What are the three aspects that managers should definitely expand their horizons on? Short-term agility—how to develop capabilities in the organisation so that it can quickly respond to change, long-term vision—how to make decisions that are agile but at the same time are also strategic, I NDIAN MANAGEMENT NOVEMBER 2015 45
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