| Book | Main Argument About Agility |
| Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor,The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth | - Large companies lack agility; they almost exclusively make bets on incremental improvements.
- They fail to enter markets perceived as undesirable, leaving this space uncontested because of what their executives believe to be the small profit margins.
- They are too concerned about the core competencies that have served them well in the past.
- Rapidly improving value requires breakthrough improvements; smaller,fringe companies tend to understand this better than large companies.
- The small, fringe companies often are able to provide simple, convenient, low-cost products that appeal to less-demanding customers; therefore, they are able to gain entry and to challenge dominant firms.
- Ultimately, the fringe companies move these innovations to the mainstream and pose formidable challenges to the established firms.
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| Sydney Finkelstein, Why Smart Executives Fail: What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes | - Managers doggedly pursue the wrong goals based on their past successes.
- Their failure comes from a lack of agility—an inability to see and pursue new opportunities.
- This is reinforced by a reliance on the wrong type of metrics, which they use in evaluation.
- Managers’ lack ofclear or realistic understanding of themselves and their companies hold them back.
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| Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market and How to Successfully Transform Them | - Success depends on the ability to cast aside the value propositions ofthe past for the value propositions of the future.
- Too many managers ignore important changes that are taking place in the external market; they focus on operational excellence to the exclusion of almost anything else.
- Too many managers fail to make the rapid strategic adjustments that are needed for their firms' growth and survival.
- Most are culturally locked in to their established routines.
- They have a comfort zone that makes them unwilling to recognize that business models mature and become outmoded.
- Survival depends on an understanding of this type of discontinuity—the regular creation and destruction of whole industries.
- Most growth comes from the emergence offast-moving new entrants in the new industries.
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| Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable | - Rapid movement to new markets is needed to set a company's products apart.
- The main challenge that managers must meet is to create remarkable products; these products should be either "horrible" or "amazing."
- The products should be absolutely unique and different.
- The main task of management is to strive continuously to maintain theuniqueness of their products.
- Managers must keep innovating; standing still is a sure-fired route to failure.
- Managers have to keep shifting their business models for sake of rapid product development.
- "Every purple cow fades unless it figures out how to be remarkable again."
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| Mary Kwak and David Yoffie, Judo Strategy: Turning Your Competitor's Strength to Your Advantage | - Masters of movement continuously have shown that they have the ability to outmaneuver their opponents.
- Small corporate "Davids" often have been able to defeat much larger corporate "Goliaths" because they are faster moving and more agile than their opponents.
- To succeed,the upstarts manage to throw their competitors off balance, which neutralizes the competitors' initial advantage.
- The upstarts also must maintain their own balance to survive the inevitable counterattacks that the competitors they have attacked will launch.
- They have to go for the kill when they have the leverage to pin their opponents.
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| Adrian Slywotzky, Value Migration | - The firms that succeed make the right moves; by making the right moves, they create value.
- "Business chess is a game... (of) constant shuttling between a focus on the current move and imagining the next several moves out."
- Managers must make these moves to avoid value loss and preempt the next growth cycle.
- They must move from obsolete to new business designs; at least seven patterns of value migration exist.
- Each pattern rests on an understanding of the customer and of innovative business designs.
- Managers must understand market value, customer priorities, and future industry positions to make the right moves.
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| Adrian Slywotzky, Richard Wise, and Karl Weber, How to Grow Markets When Markets Don't | - Corporate mindset, culture, history, leadership, and commitments reduce the ability that managers have to recognize and pursue new opportunities.
- To succeed,managers should follow a sequence of moves to differentiate their company's offerings.
- The aim should be to help customers make better decisions about their lives.
- Companies better serve customers through innovations that address the hassles and issues surrounding a product, rather than making improvements in the product.
- Managers should start by working on customers' most urgent problems, the issues customers constantly wrestle with, and the headaches they have.
- They should not rely on classic product-focused strategies that involve simple product extensions, enhancements, and even product breakthroughs, because even these can be easily copied.
- Winning moves come from having maverick ideas
about product use.
- Managers should focus on the customer value chain—how the customer spends time on and off the job.
- Managers should look for bottlenecks, repetition, information gaps, and missed opportunities in the customer's value chain.
- They should try to improve the customer's cost structure and reduce complexity in using products.
- They also should speed products to the market and reduce risk and volatility in their use.
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| Donald Sull, Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them | - Inflexible commitments create inertia that prevents adjustments in business formulas that at one time were successful but are no longer so when competitive situations change.
- Managers should not respond to the future by doing more of what worked well for them in the past.
- They must make creative adjustments to the new situation.
- The essence of these readjustments is to move away from old commitments and to create new ones.
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