the new hr

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Baba Prasad is
president and CEO,
Vivékin Group. He
is also the author
of Nimble - How
intelligence can
create agile
companies and
wise leaders.
and culture. Our microeconomics-driven analytical
approach to strategy has forgotten the critical
people aspect, which we need to bring back into
the organisation.
You say ‘strategy is no longer a plan for a set
of actions to be performed’. Given this, how
would you define strategy?
Since we now work in environments where we
increasingly have no idea of what will happen even
in the next few weeks or months, we do not have
the luxury of multi-year strategic plans. We need
to be prepared to handle a range of eventualities
that may occur anytime. Strategy is no longer about
creating a plan of actions that will be performed in
the future; it is about planning and building a set
of flexibilities the organisation can use to handle an
uncertain future, as it unfolds.
Define visionary intelligence.
Visionary intelligence is the ability to quickly
envision both the long-term effects of a current
decision—what will be the result of this decision
a few years from now?—and also to quickly
determine the width of impact it will have—how
many people or processes will it affect, and in
what ways? What could be just reactive kneejerk
response becomes strategic with the use of
visionary intelligence. It helps us see the difference
between killing the goose and waiting for the
golden eggs.
Elaborating on the reasons for the failure
of Nokia, you talk about the need for
developing ‘multiple agilities’. Please
elaborate this concept in the Vivékin Agility
Matrix (VAMTM).
Nokia made a name for itself with its tremendous
supply chain flexibility. Its response after a fire in a
New Mexico factory that made chips for its phones
is cited as a textbook case of supply chain agility.
And yet, a few years after this, Nokia’s stock prices
were kissing the floor. They over-focused on this
one agility and neglected others—for instance, it
did not show the communicative agility needed
to sense that the North American market wanted
a different kind of handset than the Asian market,
and it lost out to Motorola there. Companies, and
leaders, should have multiple agilities and use them
in context-sensitive ways.
The Vivékin Agility Matrix is a 2x2 matrix that
classifies companies based on whether they have
multiple agilities and whether they are context
sensitive. Companies that are neither agile
nor context-sensitive are ‘dinosaurs’—despite
possessing massive resources, they will die because
they do not adapt. This happened to computer giant
Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1990s, at a
time when IBM also barely survived. Companies
that are not agile but are context sensitive are
‘bears’; they know they cannot operate in certain
contexts, so they withdraw when conditions are
bad and re-emerge when the context is better.
‘Cheetahs’ are companies like Nokia that respond
to everything with a single agility, without paying
attention to context—just like the cheetah which
hunts only by running across plains in daytime as
it cannot climb trees or see at night. Finally, the
model company in the Vivékin Agilities Matrix is
the ‘human’ which ranks high on both agility and
context-sensitiveness—humans have multiple
agilities, especially visionary agility, and know
which agility to use in which context.
How can a company/leader
programmatically develop and use agility?
The concept of strategy itself changes when you
adopt an intelligences-driven approach. We help
our client organisations implement intelligencesdriven
strategy through M-A-S-T: ‘mapping’ the
kinds of flexibilities they anticipate they will need
in the market space they are in; ‘assessing’ what
flexibilities they currently have; ‘strategising’ to
(i) develop the flexibilities they do not have but
anticipate they will need and (ii) to leverage the
flexibilities they already have; and since it is an
uncertain world, ‘testing’ to check whether the
mapping, the assessment, and the strategising
have been correct. This returns us in a loop to the
mapping phase. We call this the MAST loop. Agile
46 INDIAN MANAGEMENT NOVEMBER 2015