Change as an opportunity

While most enterprises are struggling to deal with change, there are many enterprises that are succeeding in effectively dealing with it. Digitally driven enterprises, such as Apple, Amazon, and Google, are leveraging change for growth. Even traditional enterprises such as Ericsson, a 140-year-old firm, and Barclays, a 300-year-old bank, are doing things very differently in order to deal with change. Ericsson has over 100 small teams responding to its customers' needs in three-week cycles. At Barclays, over 800 teams are part of an organization-wide Agile transformation initiative aiming to deliver instant, frictionless, and intimate value at scale. [xix]

Enterprises that are dealing effectively with a rapidly changing environment appear to have drastically different characteristics compared to enterprises that continue to be rooted in the past. The following table brings out some of the key differences:

Characteristic	Enterprises struggling with change	Enterprises thriving on change
Primary motive	Profit	Purpose
Structure	Hierarchy	Flexible networks
Ways of working	Process driven	People driven
Leadership style	Directive	Empowering
Team organization	By roles/skills	By outcomes
Primary outcome	Efficiency	Value
Governance	Compliance driven	Value driven
Role of technology	Tactical	Strategic

Enterprises that are succeeding today realize that they operate in a complex environment where technology is disrupting business models, competitive advantage is transient, and outcomes are not linear. The critical differentiator between struggling and succeeding enterprises is the level of agility, which separates the winners from the losers.

According to Prosci, an organization offering change management-related solutions, "To be successful in this environment of rapid, concurrent and never-ending change, organizations must grow their change agility not just to thrive, but to survive." In fact, senior leaders are starting to acknowledge how important agility is to their success. In a PwC survey of 1150 CEOs [xx], 76% said that their ability to adapt to change will be a key source of competitive advantage in the future. [xxi]

The rest of this book is devoted to getting an enterprise ready to embrace change, with a view to treating disruptive change as an opportunity, rather than as a threat. Enhancing enterprise agility is imperative to achieving this.