by Jeremy Dann

Don Sull interview:

I wrote this book to make it scalable to folks at different levels of an organization. Some lessons are focused on people in the C-Suite, but there are a set of things that you can do if you are running a business unit, a function, or a region.  One of the points I raise in the book is about the need for agility. There are three different types. The first is operational agility. Within your business unit there are steps you can take to seize opportunities to grow revenues and cut costs. The second type is what I call portfolio agility. That means pulling resources out of less productive or promising ventures and putting them in more productive opportunities. The third is strategic agility. Periodically the environment throws golden opportunities your way — to acquire a competitor or enter a new market, for instance — and you need to be able to see and seize those opportunities.

You see those opportunities at all levels of an organization. Even with portfolio agility, which some people say is a headquarters responsibility. But every manager is making portfolio decisions of some sort; they’re just smaller.  And you’d be surprised at how mid-level folks can affect strategic agility. They can often start the ball rolling for some type of acquisition when they see, say, a competitor on its heels.

If you rely on only the CEO to drive agility in your organization, you are dead. You’re not distributing both the responsibility and the decision-making to take the actions to thrive in turbulent markets.  And, if you’re a big, complex organization, you are dead.

When I teach these concepts in a boot-camp format, about one-third of the attendees are CEOs or managing directors of organizations — but two-thirds aren’t.  You can apply these tools at any level of your business quite productively.