Thomas D. Williams - The Agility Factor: Building Adaptable Organizations for Superior Performance

All business leaders who deal with a rapidly changing business environment must read this book. You will learn how you can make your organization a winner in the creative destruction game while continuing to financially outperform your rivals.

Tony Petrella, consultant; and founding partner of Block-Petrella-Weisbords

The Agility Factor is an outstanding research-based guide to creating adaptable, high-performance organizations. A great read for managers, consultants, and scholars.

Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business Administration, and founding chairman of The Leadership Institute, University of Southern California

Clear a space on your bookshelf and make room for The Agility Factor! It is a unique and useable approach to change and leading through difficult management challenges. Every human resource in your organization will find their way to engagement and focused results through use of these principles.

Sue McNab, vice president and CHRO, PEMCO Insurance

For two decades, Chris Worley and Ed Lawler have been the most compelling voices calling for adaptive, healthy organizations. Now with Tom Williams, they present a beautifully researched and clear case for the success criteria for organizations in today's hyper-competitive landscape.

Foster W. Mobley, founder and CEO, FMG Leading

Worley, Williams, and Lawler have unraveled the nugget of sustained organizational performance. In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business context, organizations maintain superior performance by building the capability of agility. Agile corporations strategize, perceive, test, and implement faster than competitors and consistent with market changes. Their work is a marvelous integration of innovative ideas, sound research, and relevant actions.

Dave Ulrich, professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; and partner, The RBL Group

The half-life of a distinctive, coherent strategy is shrinking in today's dynamic marketplace. Leading organizations make up for this with agility as they sense and respond to rapid changes before their competitors. This becomes the new competitive advantage for the twenty-first century.

R. Andrew Clyde, president and CEO, Murphy USA Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Worley, Christopher G.

The agility factor: building adaptable organizations for superior performance/ Christopher G. Worley, Thomas Williams, Edward E. Lawler, III; foreword by James OToole.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-82137-4 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-82141-1 (ebk); 978-1-118-82139-8 (ebk)

1. Organizational changeManagement. 2. Organizational effectiveness. I. Williams, Thomas. II. Lawler, Edward E. III. Title.

HD58.8.W683 2014

658.406dc23

2014019132

A century ago, a young retailer named James Cash Penney explained to one of his managers how he planned to reorganize their company in new and untried ways, all of which were designed to empower the managers of the small chain of clothing outlets to be responsive to the changing needs of their customers. The manager immediately understood the genius of what Penney was proposing: What you are planning, sir, is an organization that will always be renewing itself from within!

We now know Penney had the right idea: truly great business leaders create self-renewing organizations. And that's what Jim Penney achieved at what would becomefor a brief period, at leastthe world's leading retailer. Unfortunately, Penney lost interest in the business he founded before he had a chance to institutionalize the organizational capacities needed for the company to sustain the agility it would need to thrive in the long term. The J.C. Penney company is still around, of course. But for decades it has been desperately thrashing about, trying one me-too strategy after another in a constant struggle to keep afloat in the ever-changing world of retailing.

The history of J.C. Penney is, sadly, much like that of dozens of other formerly great companies ranging from General Motors to Motorola to Hewlett-Packard. In fact, most large companies seem doomed to a cycle of lurching from success to crisis, then frantically trying to regain their former excellence by way of large-scale, disruptive, costlyand typically ineffectiveorganizational change programs.

But there are exceptions to this general rule of unsustainable successspecifically, a small number of notable companies with long-term records of high performance (as measured in cold cash). And management consultants and professors (like me) have been trying (and failing) for decades to figure out how they accomplish this trick. But as the authors of this path-breaking book convincingly demonstrate, we have been barking up the wrong tree: there is no such trick to be found. In fact, there is no magic formula, no secret sauce, no five, ten (or even twenty) best practices that lead to sustainable high performance. In hindsight, we should have been able to see that. After all, if great management consisted of simply adopting a universally effective set of policies or practices, all companies would follow suit and ape the actions of the leaders in their industries