Culture and Agility. Agility and value-based management

Thomas Reiner | 31.07.2019

Digital transformation is changing business models. This realization has now become an established reality. But organizational concepts must also be transformed correspondingly. The new buzzword for that is agility.
Agility signifies the entrepreneurial ability to react flexibly to changing market conditions with cross-functional, self-organized teams.

The attempt to implement and establish agility often fails at the beginning.

Typical mistakes of the management are:

• Trying to tackle agility like a classic project: Describe, prescribe, done.
• Sending employees with lacking orientation on an agile journey.
• Getting lost in the rule delusion and creating more chaos than orientation.

Agility, however, requires a far-reaching cultural change. Employees must be empowered to work together towards changing goals. And that must happen without “orders from above”.

More instructive than scrum methodologies, is to take a closer look at the cultural approaches of New Tech companies. For example, Netflix states: “Values are what we value”.

What Netflix means is that corporate values are those behaviors and abilities that they value about their peers. They encourage and promote colleagues who demonstrate the behaviors and skills they value. And they employ new people on the same principle.

Behind this approach is the conviction that the highest goals can only be achieved with value-based management.