Business Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World

The relentless pursuit of industrial efficiency no longer yieldsthe profits it once did because it requires a level of businesspredictability that no longer exists. Instead, the Internet andglobal video and telecom systems provide a massive and continuousflow of data that causes the whole world to behave like a giantstock market, with all the volatility and uncertainty that goesalong with such markets. Responsiveness now trumpsefficiency.

By being responsive to the evolving needs and desires ofspecific groups of customers, companies can wrap their products andservices in a tailored blanket of value-added services toconsistently earn an additional four percent or more gross marginthan they would otherwise earn for the product or service alone.This customer and market specialization is the most promising andthe most sustainable source of profits in our fluid, real-timeeconomy.

Part of the Microsoft Executive LeadershipSeries, Business Agility discusses the threefundamental process loops that drive an agile enterprise and howthey work together to deliver the responsiveness that generatesprofits in a high-change economy. Providing strategies forinnovative and pragmatic use of people, process, and technology todrive operations in an agile enterprise, this book reveals theprinciples of the agile enterprise, backed by real-world casestudies from the author's own experience.

Michael Hugos is a speaker, writer, and practitioner in IT andbusiness agility, and agile system development methods. He writes acolumn for Computerworld and a blog titled "Doing Businessin Real Time" for CIO magazine.