“By being responsive to the needs and desires of specific groups of customers, companies can wrap their products and services in a blanket of value-added services to consistently earn an additional two to four per cent (and sometimes more) in gross margin than they would otherwise earn for the product or service alone,” he assures.

To be responsive, you must be agile, which is why Hugos sees the ‘agile enterprise’ as ‘the next wave of innovation and productivity’. Such an organisation, ‘the equivalent of the assembly line in our information economy’, would use a set of processes, enabled by existing information technology and an organisational structure, “to acquire and act on up-to-date information to continually improve existing operations and devise new operations as opportunities arise.”

To be an agile enterprise you must learn ‘how to make profit by many small adjustments and some occasional big wins’.

Hugos depicts the dynamics of agility using three loops. The first loop is for monitoring inputs for the non-standard ones and exceptions to the routine, and deciding whether the input “indicates either there is an error in the information or the processing system or it indicates the appearance of something new that has not been seen before and for which there are no standard operating procedures.” Remember: “New profit opportunities mostly lie in responding to the unexpected or non-standard events.”

After the decision is made, it is either loop 2 or 3 that takes over. Loop 2 is for fixing errors and improving existing operations, and delivering efficiency; and loop 3 creates new operations, new procedures and systems, and thus delivers effectiveness.

A book that can add verve to your work.

D. Murali

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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