Building agility and responsiveness
Introduction
In the following chapter we will examine how transport and logistic managers can enhance organisational agility. The study will set the scene for the next chapter's consideration of how managers can use innovation or learning to assist construct an organisation able to attain sustainable competitive advantage through its agility.
Organisations are traditionally risk averse. So the resulting leadership styles and management practices have come to reflect this aversion to risk; in all its forms. Certainty and stability in large organisations has been achieved through routinised procedures and practices that limit risk within known processes. Mature organisations also identify core or dominant business that have been built on past practices that often mask an inability for the organisation to innovate, learn new capabilities or develop new business activities.
In the modern, global marketplace, such approaches instil inertia and promote market opportunities for organisations able to respond positively to new challenges and changing customer needs. Basically, the later transport and logistic organisations see change as an opportunity rather than a threat. Responding strategically and rapidly to emerging opportunities and needs becomes their competitive advantage over their often larger or more cost competitive business competitors.
In this chapter we will study how competitiveness is now being interwoven with agility. Throughout the chapter we will analyse why and explore how organisations are moving towards the paradigm of transformational leadership and learning generatively, rather than transactional or process oriented leadership and adaptive learning.
Learning objectives
After completing the work for this chapter you should be able to:
- Outline the aspects that make an organisation agile
- Identify how the quest for organisational agility may impact upon an individual's leadership style and practice
- Analyse the relationship between transformational leadership and generative learning
- Analyse the relationship between generative learning, organisational responsiveness and agility
