United States – Page 4 – understand-culture

McNamara on Flexible Response

Robert Strange McNamara (June 9, 1916 – July 6, 2009) was an American business executive and the eighth United States Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

He remains the longest serving Secretary of Defense, having remained in office over seven years. He played a major role in promoting the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy analysis.

10 Traits of Highly Agile Companies

June 2021. Gallup. Among all the bad news recently is this positive discovery: German companies are perhaps becoming much more agile.

In fact, Gallup’s Agility Index shows an eight-percentage-point increase — from 9% in 2019 to 17% in 2020 — in German workers who strongly agree their company has the right mindset, tools and processes to respond quickly to business needs.

What is business agility

Business agility refers to rapid, continuous, and systematic evolutionary adaptation and entrepreneurial innovation directed at gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. Business agility can be sustained by maintaining and adapting the goods and services offered to meet with customer demands, adjusting to the marketplace changes in a business environment, and taking advantage of available human resources.

In a business context, agility is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways. An extension of this concept is the agile enterprise, which refers to an organization that uses key principles of complex adaptive systems and complexity science to achieve success. Business agility is the outcome of organizational intelligence.

Retail Realities

Rebuilding economic resiliency as brick and mortar goes to pieces.

For years the Oakland, California, suburb of Pittsburg followed a traditional playbook in its efforts to revitalize its downtown: It tried to lure retailers. First, it focused on trying to replace the JCPenney and Montgomery Ward department stores that closed. That didn’t work out.

Harvard ExecEd – Strategic Agility

Facing rapid change—and even unprecedented upheaval—large and small businesses alike must race against time to innovate and adjust their strategies, business models, organizational systems, and cultures.

While some organizations struggle with rapid transformation, many are able to evolve quickly because leaders have built strategic agility into the organization’s DNA. In this live online program, you’ll learn how to become a more strategically agile leader who can help your organization compete and succeed in uncertain times.

Flexible Response warfare

Flexible Response, also called Flexible Deterrent Options (FDO), U.S. defense strategy in which a wide range of diplomatic, political, economic, and military options are used to deter an enemy attack.

The term flexible response first appeared in U.S. General Maxwell D. Taylor’s book The Uncertain Trumpet (1960), which sharply criticized U.S. national security policy. Initially designed to thwart communist expansion more effectively, the strategy has become a fundamental principle of American military thinking.fare

Experiential learning

Arguably the most natural and powerful form of learning is through experience, or more precisely through reflection on doing. This is also known as experiential learning.

U.S. History 2.5 mil views, not bad

A parody with video style and presentation inspired by Bill Wurtz.

How Short-Term Thinking Makes the U.S. Worse at Fighting Wars

The Atlantic. 2012. In 2010, the U.S. adopted a new tactic in southern Afghanistan: it began to bulldoze entire villages to clear them of IEDs. The policy — reminiscent of Vietnam, of destroying villages to save them — spoke to a deeper issue with how the war was being fought.

Short-term objectives were emphasized over long term planning or consequence management. Destroying villages carries enormous long-term costs for a region, and the U.S. military just wasn’t paying attention to what those would be.

Yes, Short-Termism Really Is a Problem

Harvard Business Review. 2015. Thirty years ago, no less a business guru than Peter Drucker weighed in, skewering short-termism in a Wall Street Journal editorial.

“Everyone who has worked with American management can testify that the need to satisfy the pension fund manager’s quest for higher earnings next quarter, together with the panicky fear of the raider, constantly pushes top managements toward decisions they know to be costly, if not suicidal, mistakes,” he wrote.