Organizational Agility Quotes

For me, I think the bigger something is, the more difficult it is to make it nimble and fleet afoot.

When you're smaller and leaner, you're not going to have that large a presence throughout the world.

Very often, organizations are inflexible because there is too little communication between functions; they are too segregated.

So companies have to be very schizophrenic. On one hand, they have to maintain continuity of strategy. But they also have to be good at continuously improving.

Major organizational changes create uncertainty. But the point is to move quickly - faster than you are comfortable - because in hindsight, you will always wish you had made changes even sooner.

To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent

Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.

The beauty of having an LLC in today's world is No. 1, you have the ability to act and react as nimbly as need be to create change, and you have the ability to invest politically, in the for-profit sector and the nonprofit sector simultaneously.

We undertook a huge internal transformation to sharpen our customer focus, step up innovation, improve productivity to ensure competitiveness, change our culture, and simplify our ways of working so that our size and scale became a competitive advantage rather than a bureaucratic hangover after years of diversification.

To get a big company moving fast, especially on a many-headed opportunity like the Internet, you have to have hundreds of people participating and coming up with ideas.

The basic DNA we've got to implant in leaders now is adaptability: not to get wedded to the solution to a particular problem, because not only the problem but the solution changes day to day. Creating people who are hardwired for that is going to be our challenge for the future.

Elon Musk should be at the top of the list of people to emulate when it comes to leading large organizations that are highly maneuverable and use it as a competitive advantage.

The underlying principles of strategy are enduring, regardless of technology or the pace of change.

You can't build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own.

The Wellcome Trust will retain a level of financial flexibility which will enable us to react quickly to unexpected developments and new ideas.

Organizations aren't loyal; they can't be. They have to be nimble, they have to change. That means everybody in every organization will have one eye on his or her own brand, and the other eye on the organization of which he or she is a part. And the first loyalty - self-loyalty - is becoming more and more dominant, simply as a survival strategy. I'm in no way blaming anyone here; this is just simply a fact of life.

Organisations with decision-making speed and imagination will thrive as nobody can claim to have a monopoly over creativity.

I am very pleased with the progress of the new CBS Corporation. The Company's rapid pace of change and innovative approach to emerging business opportunities can be seen in the many strategic announcements we have made over these past few months. The more focused and more nimble organization we sought to create has become a reality and that aggressive spirit of excellence and innovation will continue to benefit shareholders for many years to come.

The EU must be able to act with the speed and flexibility of a network, not the cumbersome rigidity of a bloc.

Plans must be simple and flexible....They must be made by the people who execute them.

Companies generally work better when they are smaller. It's always worth spending time to think about the least amount of projects/work you can feasibly do, and then having as small a team as possible to do it.

Make sure a certain percentage of the people that you're hiring are generalists so that you can be, kind of reconfigured in the workforce pretty easily.

It is a popular error that bureaucracy is less flexible than private enterprise. It may be so in detail, but when large scale adaptations have to be made, central control is far more flexible. It may take two months to get an answer to a letter from a government department, but it takes twenty years for an industry under private enterprise to readjust itself to a fall in demand.

Usually, the biggest companies are not the most dynamic.

All organizations start with a structure that looks like a dynamic solar system. They can be very fast, agile. They attract people who play around with crazy ideas.