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In turbulent times, companies need agility to survive drastic

change: Vivekin Group's Baba Prasad
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By Priyanka Sangani, ET Bureau | 14 Aug, 2015, 05.16AM IST

Agility is becoming the latest business buzzword. With turbulence and uncertainty becoming
an integral part of the new normal, companies need to hone their abilities to respond quickly
to change.
In his new book, Nimble, Baba Prasad, president & CEO, Vivekin Group, a strategic
management consultancy says that there are five kinds of intelligences organisations need
to develop if they want to be truly agile. In an interview with Corporate Dossier, Prasad talks
about visionary intelligence and how leaders can drive it. Edited excerpts:
How do corporates cultivate agility?
My work has showed that organisations can become

Agility is the ability of an organisation to respond quickly to change. Although the word
'adaptability' is used often in business contexts, the word 'adapt' suggests to me change that
lacks speedDarwinian adaptation happens over millenniaand so, I prefer the term
'agility.' Typically organisations develop agility by introducing flexibility into their
organisational structures and business processes through technology, and also by creating

significantly agile by simultaneously focusing on making their

employees agile, says consultant & author Baba Prasad.

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alternative, back-up resources. My work has showed that organisations can become
significantly agile by simultaneously focusing on making their employees agile.
What sets an agile organisation apart from the others?
An agile organisation is resilientit can overcome unforeseen setbacks and downturnsand, at the same time, it is able to take
advantage of unexpected opportunities. Thus, agility is both an insurance against bad times, and a pitchfork to make hay when the sun
shines. In an agile organisation, change and uncertainty are not things to fear; they are seen as creators of opportunities for the company
to outperform competition and establish industry leadership.
The ruling metaphor to describe the current business climate is turbulence. Technologies change constantly and quickly, globalisation
brings unforeseen, non-traditional competition, and customer demands and preferences become unpredictable. In addition, unstable
governments and fickle regulatory policies, and changing patterns of labour migration combine with the threat of employee attrition to
complete a mix that is as potent as the witches' brew in Macbeth. In such a context, companies desperately need agility, the ability to
handle unpredictable, and sometimes drastic change.
As a CEO, how do you drive this through your organisation?
Agility is a blanket-term for all kinds of flexibilities. My research, which began when I was at the Wharton School, and which continued
when I was a faculty member at the business schools at Purdue University and the University of Minnesota, has shown that we need to
think of not one agility, but five different agilities. In Nimble, I argue that a company that wants to be agile should focus on developing five
intelligences, each of which drives a kind of agilityanalytical, operational, inventive, communicative and visionary. While the other
intelligences are self-descriptive, visionary intelligence allows a company to focus on longterm consequences and also to bring into the
picture the width of the impact of a managerial decision. What could be just a reactive knee-jerk response with the other intelligences
becomes strategic with the use of visionary intelligence. Further, the use of these five agilities should be sensitive to the organisation's
current context. For instance, in one context, the organisation may need to use more analytical and communicative agility, and in another
context, it may have to use more operational agility.
How do you build your strategy around this?

The concept of strategy itself changes when you adopt an intelligencesdriven approach. Strategy is no longer about creating a plan of
actions that will be performed in the future. Strategy is about planning and building in the organisation a set of flexibilities that may be
used to handle an uncertain future as it unfolds. We help our clients implement intelligencesdriven strategy through four phases: mapping
the kinds of flexibilities we anticipate we will need in the market space we are in; assessing what flexibilities we currently have;
strategizing to develop the flexibilities we do not have but anticipate we will need and to leverage the flexibilities we already have; and
since it is an uncertain world, testing whether our mapping, assessment, and strategy have been correct. This returns us in a loop to the
'mapping' phase. We call this the MAST loop. Agile companies continuously loop through the four phases of strategy, executing the MAST
loop.
What are the tangible benefits to business of building an agile organisation?
The first tangible benefit is survivability itself. Just think of what happened to the booming minicomputer industry in the early 1990s, a time
when IBM almost collapsed, as desktop and personal computers began to take over the market. The stories of the once thriving but now
extinct dinosaurs like DEC, Wang Labs, and Prime Computers tell you that irrespective of resources, if you are not agile, if you are not
nimble, your very existence is threatened. Second, as the many studies that I quote in my book Nimble show, agility has a direct impact on
the profits of a company a study at the University of Southern California showed that agile companies are seven times more likely to be
outperforming the market as compared to not-agile companies; other research at MIT showed that agile companies grow revenue 37 per
cent faster and generate 30 per cent higher profits than not-agile companies.
Who, according to you, is doing a good job of this?
There are many brilliant examples of agile organisations that I discuss in my book Nimble, but one Indian example that comes to mind is
the sugar company, EID Parry. EID Parry's main factoryin Nellikuppamwas destroyed by Cyclone Thane in 2011. That the company
restored normal operations in the factory in a few days is a remarkable story of agility. But beyond that kind of operational agility, EID
Parry has assiduously focused on visionary intelligenceit has worked with the farmers who supply cane to it, making them long-term
partners. As a result, EID Parry has acquired strategic agility, and hence is a top performer in its industry.
Any other aspects that leaders should keep in mind building an agile organisation?
In our search for agility, it is easy to become obsessed with technologies and organisational systems, and to lose sight of the human
factor. Agile people are the drivers of agility in organisations. It is now old knowledge in IT-based strategy that what matters is not just the
technology itself, but also what you do with the technology. So, the importance of the agile employee, the agile manager, and the agile
leader in the organisation must not be underestimated. Agility must be developed in employees across the organisation. I have come to
believe after 15 years of research and consulting that whether in business processes, in organisation design, or in people, the
development and context-sensitive use of the five agilities, especially the visionary agility, makes a significant difference both to the
company and to the world at large.
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