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The author posits that the management model of an organization determines what kind of business models can be pursued within that organization and that successful 21st century management models are very different from those that succeeded in the 20th century.

The author compares and contrasts successful 21st century management models with models that succeeded in the 20th century.

Success in the digital age requires a 21st century management model and mindset based on an obsession with delivering value to customers.

The management model incorporates the key ‘written and unwritten rules’ of the firm. The success of digital innovation can be threatened by 20th Century management assumptions that thwart Agile initiatives.

Article explains how Agile mindsets and practices are essential to the 21st century management model, and how they potentiate the firm’s focus on creating customers.

Provides lessons in strategic agility from the presentations of two Drucker Forum thought leaders at the annual conference in Vienna in November.

Summarizes the Drucker Forum conference presentations of Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley serial-entrepreneur, and Professor Carlota Pérez.

Blank warns that, “Companies and government organizations are discovering that innovation activities without a defined innovation pipeline are likely to result in innovation theater.” 10; 10;Pérez believes the world has an historic opportunity to turn our environmental problems into economic solutions.

Pérez warns “Business is trapped in the illusion that a minimal state is always best.”

Steve Denning highlights paradigm shifting lessons that Blank and Pérez have to offer managers.

The transition from shareholder value primacy to customer-centricity is a multi-dimensional challenge for leaders.

Five books that provide guidance.by insiders are suggested.

Nadella confronted culture on day one and announced that from then on, the culture would be one of collaboration and finding mutually profitable solutions. Instead of an “us vs. them,” paradigm, it would be “us with them.”

“Agile management” refers to a set of management goals, principles, values and practices that emerged to speed up software. Now its tools and culture are spreading to all kinds of organizations throughout the world—from R&D to top management teams. As some corporations race to become “agile” they can lose sight of the essential ideas and practices of Agile methodology

In September 2016, a group of large firms came together in New York to see whether they could agree on what Agile stood for in their own organizations. They aspired to create workplaces that draw on everyone’s creative talents and kindle everyone’s potential in workplaces that respect individuals and are highly productive and profitable. The firms involved were members of the SD Learning Consortium (SDLC)—a non-profit corporation.

As it is being adopted in a wide variety of corporate settings since 2001, the core concept of Agile has evolved.

To be fully entrepreneurial, the whole organization needs to embrace the Agile mindset and function as an interactive network, not a top-down bureaucracy with just a few teams implementing Agile tools and processes.

As Agile is being increasingly adopted by all corporate functions and levels of management it is essential to focus the whole organization on creating value for the customer.

By learning how to overcome implementation challenges, the Agile methodology can enable organizations to cope with the 21st Century marketplace and deliver what customers expect and demand: easy, quick, convenient, personalized responsiveness at scale.”

The 10 major implementation challenges are addressed.

Agile offers a methodology that can improve the chances of building a new product or service that people will actually buy, use and like.

A key Agile principle – doing work in small iterative cycles with customer feedback at the end of each cycle – is a transformative idea.

The author has recently made on-site visits to leading corporations that have adopted Agile. The “Agile” managers he met recognize that the future of their firm depends on inspiring those doing the work to accelerate innovation and add genuine value to customer, that enhancing that capacity depends on giving autonomy to self-organizing teams within broad parameters of control.

Under the co-direction of John Hagel, Deloitte’s Center for the Edge has been publishing important new studies of disruption with an ‘outcome-based approach to disruption.’ This research is discovering patterns that may help leaders institute defenses against threats and identify opportunities for innovators

Deloitte research is focusing on patterns of disruption that hit more than one market, but not all markets. It is examining: what are the characteristics of markets that would make them vulnerable to a particular pattern?

After six months of research, Deloitte has identified nine patterns that meet its outcome-based criteria. A number of the patterns are based on creating network effects that grow so quickly they become hard to compete with if the rival firm does not already have an established market position. Another set of the patterns identifies ways to fundamentally transform the value-cost equation, but without network effects.

More patterns may be discerned as the research proceeds.

For example, if incumbents and innovators just think about driverless cars as the auto industry, they are never going to fully see the disruption that is coming. By contrast, by thinking about it as a mobility ecosystem, then many other key players, risks and opportunities become apparent

The patterns identified by Deloitte research may provide leaders with insights into how to defend against specific disruptions and also offer innovators inspiration for new opportunities in established markets and Blue Ocean ventures.

What is required to deliver innovation that meets evolving customer needs is a process of learning from the future.

The major financial gains in the digital economy usually flow from generating innovations that create entirely new markets by turning non-customers into customers.

Amazon has developed a highly productive value-creation approach called the PR/FAQ process. It starts by imagining the customer’s needs in the future and then describing in detail the offering that would meet those needs.

To get more consistent success in generating market-creating innovations, explicit attention to non-users is needed.

Exponential advances in digital technologies, and the interactions between them, are expanding the possibilities for market-creating innovation.

Practitioners can learn much about how a CEO can generate and sustain business agility from examining the role of Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon—arguably the world’s most-agile large organization.

Amazon demonstrates mastery of strategic agility by having successfully shifted Amazon into a whole series of new businesses on a massive scale.

As Amazon acquires new skills, it doesn’t just become more proficient in its own business: it turns these into newly-created capabilities into new businesses.”

For Bezos, the medium-term road map for the future is ‘pretty much all that he works on, delegating the day-to-day business operations to others.’ His job is all about long-term thinking.

This article examines Amazon’s remarkable record of continuous innovation in the light of its Agile mindset. The practices will be illuminating to senior executives seeking to promote an innovation-focused culture in their organizations.

While some large organizations are preoccupied with mastering operational Agility as a way to upgrade existing products and services, they and the wider management community need to realize that the main financial benefits from Agile management will flow from the next frontier: achieving Strategic Agility, a market-making approach to innovation.

The author proposes that firms adopt Agile management as a way to promote market-creating innovations through a process of imagining and delivering something that unexpectedly delights whole new groups of customers, once they realize the possibilities.

The potential of the Agile approach to innovation is that it can revitalize mature companies by discovering new customer experiences and create products and services that fulfill unmet needs.

This article shows how Agile management and strategic management concepts like “Jobs to be done” theory and “Blue Ocean” strategy can merge to promote market-creating innovation.

Given that industry borders are dissolving and competition is more dynamic than ever, the need for Strategic Agility – speedy, customer focused innovation that aims to make markets–is becoming increasingly obvious. This confluence of Agile and strategic management is a new and exciting approach to innovation.

When firms embrace an adaptive interactive development mindset—obsessing over the needs of customers, systematically working in small self-organizing teams working in short cycles, operating as a network rather than command-and-control hierarchy—its software developers can work with management to innovate new customer value.

The article identifies the reasons that the need for innovative, rapid software developments has had on the way corporations are organized and managed.

Software development went from being a drag on organizational performance to being a key driver of success.

Business agility thus isn’t just a matter of applying agile software practices to other functions.

Computer software, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud computing, is now enabling, improving or accelerating almost everything that humans, machines and organizations do. This article explains why an Agile mindset is the key to winning in the competitive race to offer high-value, innovative, digitally powered products and services.