Today's economic challenges demand the insight and flexibility that can turn short-term challenges into long-term success.
Survival in business depends on the ability to adapt to fast-changing and unforgiving circumstances. Agile Business for Fragile Times examines the practices of consistently successful companies and identifies the techniques they use to strengthen core operations, drive profitability, and tenaciously identify opportunities for revenue growth--through both good times and bad.
As business leaders seek to ensure competitive sustainability, this technique-based guidebook presents the strategic, financial, and operational activities managers must deploy to achieve business agility. The authors highlight:
- The characteristics of an agile business
- Changing measures of success and the transforming role of the CEO
- The need to embed a continual approach to cost and growth management
- Responses to conventional wisdom, contrarianism, and the search for value
While all industries and companies are decidedly different, those that consistently weather both bull and bear markets share a remarkably similar set of survival strategies. Find out what they are and how you can best apply them for success in your own market, in Agile Business for Fragile Times.
Which "agile" companies seem to ride out the storm in better shape than others? What are they doing to more effectively manage during fragile times? What strategies are they employing in planning for a return to growth? Which of their agile strategies are applicable and effective regardless of changing economic conditions?
"Great companies are built during tough times," says Jim Morgan, CEO of Applied Materials, one of the book's interviewees. And getting there requires leadership, courage, and agility.
Behind each headline of business success stands a vigilant management team. Vigilant because they know that, no matter how good things are going, trouble could be right around the bend. Vigilant because they feel the breath of their competitors.
Vigilant because, in today's hard-fought business world, they know they have to be prepared to change and adapt at a moment's notice.
Agile Business for Fragile Times is an in-depth examination of competitive organizations of every stripe and from every industry, and of how they position themselves for success regardless of conditions. Straightforward and jargon-free, it offers the following advice:
- Use communications to strategic advantage. Turn up the volume of internal and external communications, recognizing their role as a trust builder
- Don't hibernate during a downturn. Never take the eye off revenue growth
- Performance cultures need constant monitoring. Vision is good, but execution is the bottom line.
- Strategies must align with market uncertainty. Agile businesses need to observe, react, and factor market changes into continual cost and growth refinement strategies
And beyond just looking inward, Agile Business for Fragile Times explains how successful organizations live in their markets, basing every decision on the needs and wants of the customer. Case studies and analyses clarify how successful businesses can--and must--assess the customer-value impact of each of their core processes and at each point of interaction, to create customer relationships that are honest, open, and resilient enough to resist competition based on price and other transitory factors.
Top-tier companies share consistent, fundamental common denominators, regardless of their industries. Let Agile Business for Fragile Times introduce you to the strategies and techniques of A-list organizations, including Applied Materials, Reader's Digest, Reuters, Motorola, and Vodafone, and provide you with a back-to-basics business approach for withstanding challenges and exploiting opportunities during economic downturns, to better position yourself for success and growth when the economy rebounds.
Mary Pat McCarthy is global chair of KPMG's Information, Communications, and Entertainment line of business. She is a member of KPMG's Management Committee and a business adviser to many of the world's leading high-technology companies. Her prior books include the bestseller Digital Transformation and its sequel Security Transformation.
Jeff Stein is the U.S. deputy chairman and chief operating officer of KPMG LLP and chairman of the U.S. firm's Americas Management Committee. A leading authority on tax and financial matters, Stein is frequently consulted by many major multinational corporations. He was formerly KPMG's national managing partner and vice chairman of Tax, and served on the firm's Global Tax and Legal Advisory Board.
