Strategic leadership and agility in organizations

Purpose This paper explores the use of agile responses in organizations at three different management levels: CEO, executive team and enterprise wide. The authors compare and contrast three different case examples to highlight that each organizational level involves different goals, processes, skill sets, challenges and solutions. These cases underscore the need to define agility more precisely across different levels, business functions and contexts. Design/methodology/approach The authors examined the growing literature on strategic agility and developed a bespoke agility survey via an executive program with supply chain managers in Asia, as fully shown in the Appendix. The survey itself, plus the pilot data that the authors collected and summarized, underscore the need to customize survey-based agility measures to specific organizational or functional settings. The authors’ three main business cases illustrate this further at different levels in an enterprise. Findings The authors’ analysis shows that strategic agility can differ greatly from operational agility and that each type can vary markedly across situations and organizational levels. The lack of clear definitions of agility in the academic literature complicates attempts at general taxonomies or prescriptive guidance that is invariant across cases. Research limitations/implications The three cases the authors selected for comparison and contrast were based on their own familiarity with the respective situations. Each was also widely covered in general business news when the authors wrote this paper. In the absence of an agreed taxonomy for business situations involving agility, these practice-based cases helped to illustrate the conceptual points the authors wanted to make. Practical implications The best remedy in practice would be for leaders to examine how agility is currently defined in their own organization across level and functions, by means of surveys, interviews or external benchmarks. With that in hand, agility alignments can be better tailored and improved. Originality/value This paper contributes to the agility literature by highlighting its weak conceptual foundations in theory and by highlighting the contextual nature of agility in practice. By separating agility into CEO, executive-team and enterprise-wide levels, the authors offer a framework for resolving the concept’s persistent definitional ambiguity. This multi-level perspective also helps practitioners clarify which type of agility they are trying to deploy. It also helps avoid one-size-fits-all prescriptions and improve the practical value of agility oriented initiatives.