Cambridge Business Association
Resetting Management
Book

Resetting Management

Thrive with Agility in the Age of Uncertainty

Martin Králik and Stéphane J. Girod
Kogan Page, 2021
Buy book or audiobook

Read or listen offline

Amazon Kindle
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×

Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Analytical
  • Innovative
  • Hot Topic

Recommendation

Academic researchers Martin Králik and Stéphane J.G. Girod examine how to transform your organization by overthrowing outdated and rigid management styles. They aim to help you create a flexible, adaptive, innovative business that empowers employees. Resetting Management issues a resounding call for a new metanarrative of management – and offers you the tools to conceptualize and implement organizational change to keep your business competitive and relevant.

Summary

Your business must be adaptive and flexible to thrive in uncertain global markets.

The COVID-19 crisis provided two valuable lessons for companies: Complex systems create uncertainty; and businesses that thrive amid uncertainty are flexible and adaptable. Business agility is a broad philosophical approach to management that treats uncertainty as opportunity. This approach extends beyond traditional concepts of agile processes such as scrum. Organizations with agility cast aside outdated authoritarian, hierarchical structures and cumbersome bureaucracies in favor of emergent systems and values. 

Organizations are resetting the ways they lead, organize and strategize in three core ways: They embrace opportunities to innovate; they embed flexibility into their strategy, leadership and organizational design; and they don’t limit themselves to traditional models of change, thereby giving themselves permission to improvise. 

Business agility entails reconciling core tensions.

Adaptation – or agility – isn’t a new business phenomenon. For example, General Motors’ multidivisional hierarchical enterprise...

About the Authors

Professor at Switzerland’s International Institute for Management Development (IMD) Stéphane J.G. Girod focuses on organizational innovation and strategy. Dr. Martin Králik is an external research associate at IMD Business School.

Comment on this summary

  • Avatar
    Sign in to share your opinion
  • Avatar
    R. A. 3 years ago
    The recommendations look good, maybe a bit too much focus on models, i.e. scrum. My view is not to constraint the organization to a specific model but focus more on communication and agile strategies. I find a learning culture with a top-down, bottoms up open communication helps an organization to effectively manage during turbulent times as well as during growth periods. It generates energy within the organization to create and innovate thus leading to a successful outcome.
    • Avatar
      2 years ago
      I agree.with you Ramzan apart from the Scrum Model. I didn't see that is cited as reference but a baseline from which Agile has been developed. And It has better specified that Agility.is not Agile.