Organisational Agility became a mission-critical strategic issue in 2020 as Covid 19 upturned much that everyone had previously believed was predictable. Fortunately the three areas of CENTRIM’s research specialisation (change and innovation management and entrepreneurship) provided great insight into how develop organisational agility, the topic of Dave Francis’ new book.
‘Exploiting Agility for Advantage: A Step-by-Step Process for Acquiring Requisite Organisational Agility’ was published in September 2020 and takes a different view of organisational agility than most similar studies. It is based on a two-year investigation, completed in CENTRIM, of how managers use agile concepts in the real world. Dave’s research shows that requisite agility is required, meaning ‘not too much, not too little, of the right type and delivering wanted agility deliverables’. The book is intended for managers who want their enterprise to be intelligently agile but don’t know how to achieve this. It describes a seven-step agility-orientated organisation development programme for work-groups or entire organisations and provides an extensive academic underpinning for researchers and students of management. It was Professor John Bessant, previously Head of CENTRIM, who had suggested to Dave that he write this book and John commented that: “This book offers very helpful insights into the detailed mechanisms that underpin this capability, and practical guidance around how to build and embed them.”
The book is in the University of Brighton library or is available from Amazon as a paperback or a kindle book. It is currently 581 in the ranking of books on Business and Management on Amazon. If readers use the approach recommended in the book for teaching or organisation development please let Dave know (dlf@brighton.ac.uk) as he is collecting examples of application to demonstrate the impact of CENTRIM’s research on real-world practice.