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Resetting Management
Book

Resetting Management

Thrive with Agility in the Age of Uncertainty

Kogan Page, 2021 more...

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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Analytical
  • Innovative
  • Hot Topic

Recommendation

Academic researchers Martin Králik and Stéphane J.G. Girod examine how to transform your organization by overthrowing outdated and rigid management styles. They aim to help you create a flexible, adaptive, innovative business that empowers employees. Resetting Management issues a resounding call for a new metanarrative of management – and offers you the tools to conceptualize and implement organizational change to keep your business competitive and relevant.

Summary

Your business must be adaptive and flexible to thrive in uncertain global markets.

The COVID-19 crisis provided two valuable lessons for companies: Complex systems create uncertainty; and businesses that thrive amid uncertainty are flexible and adaptable. Business agility is a broad philosophical approach to management that treats uncertainty as opportunity. This approach extends beyond traditional concepts of agile processes such as scrum. Organizations with agility cast aside outdated authoritarian, hierarchical structures and cumbersome bureaucracies in favor of emergent systems and values. 

Organizations are resetting the ways they lead, organize and strategize in three core ways: They embrace opportunities to innovate; they embed flexibility into their strategy, leadership and organizational design; and they don’t limit themselves to traditional models of change, thereby giving themselves permission to improvise. 

Business agility entails reconciling core tensions.

Adaptation – or agility – isn’t a new business phenomenon. For example, General Motors’ multidivisional hierarchical enterprise...

About the Authors

Professor at Switzerland’s International Institute for Management Development (IMD) Stéphane J.G. Girod focuses on organizational innovation and strategy. Dr. Martin Králik is an external research associate at IMD Business School.