I'll be in Norway next week fishing for salmon and sea trout, thinking about how I can be agile enough to keep up with my very much younger host and his ten year old son.
When I go fly fishing I watch how agile the fish and the bugs they eat are. It is amazing to see how these beautiful creations of God change direction suddenly when they encounter either opportunity or danger. Swimming, flying, leaping, they are rapid in their responses to necessitated change.
There is a great lesson about agility in the August 3, 2009 Wall Street Journal story about startups changing business models.
Slide and other high profile startups continue to struggle to get significant revenue traction. So what have their CEOs done? They have abandoned selling advertising (dumped whole teams doing such things) and jumped into another business model in hopes of finally getting it right.
This is not a sign of bad management. It is a sign of agility.
To stand still, tough it out, "work until we get it working" leads to suicide, death of a startup. Large corporation managers are prone to do that (once).
Street smart serial entrepreneurs instead jump off the losing business model and invent a new one.
This takes a combination of wisdom, courage and creativity. Agility is not about gut feel leaps of faith over cliffs. It is about calculated moves. The changes are risky and are done with deliberation. Numbers are produced as well as intuitive thinking. The core team openly debates alternatives. The mixture leads to creative ideas about possible new business models and what to do them.
If you were also thinking about strategy, you are right: agility is closely related. Both involve moves (maneuver in French). But agility is applied to much more than strategy. When agility works on a business model, the whole company switches into action.
BOTTOM LINE: Agility in changing business models (how you make money) is key to survival of a new enterprise. Yes, a carefully thought through plan is the best way to start, but if it is not generating the revenue you need, have the courage to drop it and go create a new business model. When you get it right, you'll realize both great revenue and see your business building a powerful unfair competitive advantage.