Being Agile: How Innovators Thrive in the High Velocity Economy

I did a keynote a few weeks back for a leading North American food company.
It was a highly customized keynote, built around the theme, “Being Agile: How Innovators Thrive in the High Velocity Economy.” I think it took about 5 or 6 conference calls with senior executives at the client as I worked to build my content and insight into their overall theme. They had about 200 of their top executives at the corporate offsite. (This is typical of about 50% of the events I do ; a lot of “corporate off-sites” for Fortune 1000 companies, often at the behest of a CEO).

A quick screen shot of one of my opening slides!
What is “corporate agility” or “business agility”? From my perspective, it involves an organization that has aligned itself so that it can “respond to fast external trends in order to spot opportunity, ward off challenge and align resources for fast success.”
Of course, a good part of my talk focused on the trends in this particular sector that are driving the need for agility; specifically, the rapid emergence of new forms of in-store promotion known as “shopper marketing,” which combines location intelligence, mobile technology and in-store display technology; massive changes to the in-store payment process, including mobile payment involving Apple Pay and the complete elimination of the concept of the cash-register; the emergence of same-day shipping from titans such as Google, Amazon and Walmart; the rapid installation of “click and collect” infrastructure (i.e. an online purchase, with same day pickup at a retail location); faster ‘store fashion’ with rapid evolution of in-store promotion, layout and interaction; the arrival of intelligent packaging and intelligent (“Internet of Things”) products; and collapsing product life-cycles, rapid product obsolescence and the implications on inventory and supply chain! (All of which is covered in depth in a previous retail trends post….). Not to mention all the fast changing consumer, taste, food and social networking trends influencing today’s food purchasing decisions…
How do achieve agility in a fast moving environment? I focused on these issues:

• structure for execution
• rebuild your competitive intelligence capabilities
• watch the “edges”, particular crowdfunding initiaitves in your space
• abandon tradition – get more projects on the leading edge
• be decisive – avoid aggressive indecision
• innovate with structure – form fast teams!
• enourage entrepreneurial units – spin out units rather than reining them in
• partner up in unique ways
• redefine strategic planing – flex it to short term thinking
• build a culture that supports new ideas
• challenge decisions
• rapidly ingest new technology
• “test and learn”
• spots trends quicker
• risk failure faster
• align different generations on social projects

I spent some time walking through each of these issues in a fair bit of depth; and there is a copious amount of insight on each elsewhere throughout my blog.
And of course, avoid the “innovation killers” — which can shut down opportunities in learning how to be agile!
It was a great keynote talk on agility, and the client was genuinely thrilled.
Agility is a critical issue that organizations need to think about in a world in which the future belongs to those fast….! Here’s a video clip to whet your appetite!