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The purpose of this study was to explore what agile learning strategies businesses need to develop agile core competencies to respond to the uncertainty of the rapidly changing business environment and sustain their competitive advantage. Technology advances and unexpected crises have created an ever-changing environment in which traditional static corporate training methods have failed to continuously provide employees with the ability to listen to and interpret the rapid changes and respond accordingly.

This qualitative exploratory multi-case study was useful to explore what agile learning strategies businesses need to develop agile core competencies to sustain their competitive advantage. Snowball sampling enabled the discovery of 15 participants who represented 10 different industries. Participants represented both management and non-management roles. Data were collected from multiple sources such as interviews, observations, researcher notes and document reviews. A thematic analysis model was used to analyze the collected data.

The findings substantiated that organizations are operating in a fast-changing environment where agile learning strategies are vital to surviving. The data also showed that agile learning strategies must include individual learning paths to continuously develop employees’ agile skills to build their organizations’ agile core competencies.

This study underlined the importance of adopting agile learning strategies to help employees listen and accurately interpret their organizations’ external environments to enable quick responses to changes. Without agile learning strategies, organizational agile core competencies and competitive advantage will progressively decline.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Agile learning strategies and agile core competencies are crucial to the success of organizations in the digital economy. These principles can be adopted by others to gain and maintain competitive advantage. 10; 10;

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to increased understanding of the concept agile and its potential for hospital managers to optimize design of organizational structures and processes to combine internal efficiency and external effectiveness.

An integrative review was conducted using the reSEARCH database. Articles met the following criteria: first, a definition of agility; second, descriptions of enablers of becoming an agile organization; and finally, discussions of agile on multiple organizational levels. In total, 60 articles qualified for the final analysis.

Organizational agility rests on the assumption that the environment is uncertain, ranging from frequently changing to highly unpredictable. Proactive, reactive or embracive coping strategies were described as possible ways to handle such uncertain environments. Five organizational capacities were derived as necessary for hospitals to use the strategies optimally: transparent and transient inter-organizational links; market sensitivity and customer focus; management by support for self-organizing employees; organic structures that are elastic and responsive; flexible human and resource capacity for timely delivery. Agile is portrayed as either the “new paradigm” following lean, the needed development on top of a lean base, or as complementary to lean in distinct hybrid strategies.

Environmental uncertainty needs to be matched with coping strategies and organizational capacities to design processes responsive to real needs of health care. This implies that lean and agile can be combined to optimize the design of hospitals, to meet different variations in demand and create good patient management.

While considerable value has been paid to strategies to improve the internal efficiency within hospitals, this review raise the attention to the value of strategies of external effectiveness.

Agile manufacturing is largely dependent on the capabilities of its people to learn and evolve with change. However, while agile manufacturing uses e‐commerce enabled technology in a decentralized organizational setting, it remains unclear how these individual capabilities should be linked to other organizational resources to create an agile organization. Another important modern management research perspective is the internal resource‐based perspective, resulting in a phenomenon called competence‐based competition with renewed attention for competence management. Competence management comprises the management, building, leveraging and deployment of strategic and operational competencies, the causal relationships and linkages between them, and the way competencies are embedded in organizational and individual resources. In this paper, we explore the relation between agile management and time‐based competence management, and study its adoption in small batch discrete parts manufacturing environments with the help of a coarse fact‐finding survey research.

This paper provides an exploration of the concept and content of agile manufacturing (AM). It describes the nature of the content of AM and synthesises the literature to propose a comprehensive definition of purpose and process. Real agile manufacturing (RAM) is viewed as a strategic process; it is about surviving and prospering in the competitive environment of continuous and unpredictable change by reacting quickly and effectively to changing markets. The paper argues that RAM is evolutionary, in that it is developed from existing systems of management and technologies. However, it is also revolutionary because the full application of RAM involves a departure from existing systems. RAM is shown to be based upon four fundamentals. First, each partner must benefit; thus multiple winners (manufacturers, suppliers, customers) is the objective. Second, integration (recourses, methods, technologies, departments or organisations) is the means of achieving RAM. Third, IT is demonstrated to be an essential condition. Finally, core competence is seen to be the key.

The present business environment of accelerated complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty and volatility seems not to be settling down soon. Today’s business world is consistently bombarded with turmoil and unprecedented change. This makes it very difficult for organisations to accurately predict possible future opportunities and threats. To overcome this scenario, organisations need to fully embrace and implement agility in their operations. However, for organisations to develop a considerable level of agility that corresponds to the current hypercompetitive and volatile environment, premium needs to be placed on agile leadership. Agile leaders are capable of setting the guiding principles, develop strategies and build mechanisms that will lead to smooth transition to organisational agility (OA). These leaders give directions on how to make organisations agile and ensure that there is a leadership culture that models and promotes a holistic agility in the organisation. The primary purpose of this chapter is to establish the position of agile leadership in determining OA. The study departs from previous studies by using empirical reviews to depict the significance of agile leadership and its key roles on OA. Specifically, the concept, evolution and characteristics of OA are explored, as well as its benefits and multidimensional nature are discussed. Furthermore, the chapter sheds light on agile leadership, levels of leadership agility and competencies of successful agile leaders. The chapter concludes that the leadership style suitable for OA is agile leadership. This calls for business investments in agile capacity building and development of frameworks suitable for agile leadership.

Agile principles have been widely used in software development team practice since the creation of the Agile Manifesto. Studies have examined variables related to agile principles without systematically considering the relationships among key team, agile methodology, and process variables underlying the agile principles and how these variables jointly influence the achievement of software development agility. In this study, the authors tested a team/methodology–process–agility model that links team variables (team autonomy and team competence) and methodological variable (iterative development) to process variables (communication and collaborative decision-making), which are in turn linked to software development agility (ability to sense, respond and learn).

Survey data from one hundred and sixty software development professionals were analyzed using structural equation modeling methods.

The results support the team/methodology–process–agility model. Process variables (communication and collaborative decision-making) mediated the effects of team (autonomy and competence) and methodological (iterative development) variables on software development agility. In addition, team, methodology and process variables had different effects on the three dimensions of software development agility.

The results contribute to the literature on organizational IT management by establishing a team/methodology–process–agility model that can serve as a basis for developing a core theoretical foundation underlying agile principles and practices. The results also have practical implications for organizations in understanding and managing holistically the different roles that agile methodological, team and process factors play in achieving software development agility.

This paper aims to provide a practical model usable by organizations to help form agile virtual enterprises. The model helps to integrate a variety of factors, tangible and intangible, strategic and operational, for decision‐making purposes.

A comprehensive development of factors is determined from the literature and an analytical network process (ANP) methodology is introduced for decision model development. An illustrative example is presented.

The results provide a robust model that will aid decision makers and agile virtual enterprise brokers form partnerships within these organizational structures.

The paper introduces a conceptual model with an illustrative validating example. A practical application and reapplication of the model are required to further validate the model. ANP can require significant managerial input for its application, potentially causing fatigue for decision makers.

Practical implications include a partner selection tool and framework for decision makers. The model may be easily tweaked by the elimination or addition of decision factors and their relationships.

The paper is useful to practitioners and organizations seeking to manage partnership formation of agile virtual enterprises, an emerging organizational form. This work expands the number of factors and interrelationships among these factors that no other model has explicitly addressed for the agile virtual enterprise formation situation.

Rapid changes in the business environment and the accelerating dynamics and increasing complexity shaping the functioning of organizations have given rise to modern concepts of people management. The Management 3.0 (M3.0) concept was developed based on agile project management concept; however, it can be implemented not only in projects, but also in the entire organization. It consists of six pillars such as: energizing people, empowering teams, aligning constraints, developing competencies, growing structure, and improving everything. The paper aims to present the relationships between the level of implementation of the above-presented pillars and such variables as the scope of use of agile project management methodologies, and project managers' (PMs) as well as HR practitioners' knowledge in this area.

Members of PMI and IPMA representing 34 companies located in Poland took part in the research which was based on a CAWI method.

Research shows that the level of M3.0 implementation – in terms of its six pillars – is internally consistent but mostly on a “defined” level. No correlation was observed between the implementation of M3.0 and the frequency with which agile project management methodology is applied. On the other hand, there is a strong correlation between the level of PMs' knowledge and the implementation of some of the M3.0 pillars. HR specialists' knowledge in the field of M3.0 is not associated with organizational advances in the implementation of M3.0.

As the first research project in the area of M3.0, this study proposes practical implications as well as topics which require further empirical exploration.

With the emergence of the concepts of lean, agile and leagile paradigms for supply chains, organizations have little idea as to which model suits them based on the their supply chain's ability to counter risks and take on the challenges of the fast changing customer preferences. This paper aims to map supply chains on these two dimensions.

A model is proposed by which suitable supply chain strategy can be selected based on customer sensitivity and risk alleviation competency dimension. Graph theoretic approach is applied to quantify these dimensions for three case supply chains.

The proposed model was tested for three Indian SMEs clusters and suitable supply chain strategy was suggested.

It is recommended that the model be tested for those supply chains which have established themselves as lean, agile or leagile entities.

Suggested model would help organizations to select suitable supply chain strategy based on customer sensitivity and risk alleviation competency and the transition required in tune with the market requirements in which they operate. Also the areas which need improvements from the perspective of risk alleviation competency or customer sensitivity can be easily delineated.

Mapping supply chains based on quantification of customer sensitivity and risk alleviation competency dimension is a novel effort in the area of supply chain management.