Be Agile

To borrow a line from The Wizard of Oz, “Toto, we aren’t in Kansas anymore”.

The tornado that lifted Dorothy and her dog Toto to previously unknown places is a good metaphor for the economic tornado that has just lifted all of us into a strange and unknown business future.

The economy is showing signs of life again, and as we dust ourselves off from our encounter with the ‘tornado’ of economic near-collapse, it is time to consider what the new future of the business world will look like, and how we can function well in it.

All indications are that recovery from this, the biggest and most unusual recession in our history, will not be a standard recovery where things return pretty much to what they were before the recession. The entire economic climate in the U.S. has shifted, and we are emerging from the damage to our financial systems into an unknown business operating system. We know we’ll face changes, but we don’t quite know yet what those changes look like when we translate them into our own businesses.

What we do know is that there will be a lot of change, and we’ll need to navigate those changes enthusiastically and effectively.

I wrote a white paper recently that lays out Seven Principles of the Provocative Leader, which we at the Institute for Provocative Leadership believe to be core principles that leaders must follow in order to succeed in today’s very different business climate.

The most useful of those principles right now is the ability to be agile.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

The world is changing so fast that the Big Guys (large, established businesses) don’t have the inherent advantages they used to have.  Agility has become the name of the game, and large size can actually be a handicap these days.

Charles Darwin was right in his observations about adaptation; that survival and growth depend upon the ability to adapt to change. We call this ability to adapt quickly agility.

Some qualities of agility are:

• Be quick to locate and exploit resources for change
• Have well-developed instincts to intuit dangers and opportunities
• Act quickly and decisively
• Remain vigilant in the search for positive change.

A great living example of this nimbleness is Ron Sargent, CEO of Staples, Inc. Listen to the breathtaking agility in this excerpt from an interview with him:

“The economic slowdown has caused Staples to reexamine every aspect of its business. Over the years, we started catering to the more casual customer. But that’s not where the money is, and that’s not what we’re really good at. Now we’ve stopped carrying about 600 items that appealed to the casual customer and added 650 to 700 items that appeal to the small-business customer instead.

“We’ve improved the quality of the merchandise we offer, because businesses have different needs than the casual consumer

“Instead of advertising as much in the Sunday circulars, which businesses don’t respond to, we put more into direct marketing, upgraded our Web site, and doubled our direct-sales force in four months.

“We took the money that we originally put into advertising and reinvested it in training for our associates, and we added more staff to our stores to provide better service.

“These are important changes.”

Another extremely agile business from the Forbes list of top ten small businesses is Hansen’s Natural. It blew off the doors with an 81% jump in sales in twelve months. Hansen’s repositioned the company from a staid natural juice-maker into a leading purveyor of the hottest new performance drinks. This level of accomplishment is noteworthy in any business, but utterly spectacular in the highly competitive soft drink industry, where average annual growth is 6 to 11 percent.

In the new business world, a company must be agile, or it will eat the dust of those who are.

Doug Hickok, CEO, Institute for Provocative Leadership doug@IPLsmallbusiness.com