Agile Balance – What it is… What it does… How to get it, part 1 of 2

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Once upon a time, Jack led Jill up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Subsequently, they found the slope a bit slippery. There was a bit of a spill. After that crown-breaking calamity, Jack vowed to become so nimble that he could easily jump over any candlestick, lit or unlit.

Okay, so that’s not quite how the children’s storybook tells it. But, hopefully, like any good leader, Jack, learned from experience. Bouncing back from the fall, he was exposed to “Agile BalanceTM.” (Jill was quick to follow).

What is Agile Balance? Agile is defined as nimble or mentally quick. Balance is defined as steady, maintaining equilibrium or poise. So, Agile Balance might be defined as someone or something that is nimble, quick, steady and self-assured.

But that’s just the start.

When we peer into nature, perhaps viewing the plants and trees on the hill that Jack and Jill fell from, we won’t see a perfect moment of balance. We see Agile Balance. There is no stasis in nature. Change is constant and everywhere. Plants and animals are growing, waning or dying.

That’s the rhythm to life. And that’s the rhythm to great success, both organizationally and personally. That’s Agile Balance. There is no stasis in individuals or organizations. Whether growing, waning or dying, we change each day. And it’s our choice whether the struggle from that process makes us stronger, or nudges us along as we slip slide down the slope.

As they meet on the garden path in my book The Offsite: A Leadership Challenge Fable, guru/gardener Sam Arthur responds that he is “perfect” when Gwen Kelly asks the polite question, “How are you”. I’ve found that every reader defines Sam’s comment about “perfect” differently. Is it possible that Sam is talking about Agile Balance?

When thinking of Agile Balance, a few of the words that spring to mind are: strength, flexibility, speed, endurance and grace. These are just a few of the qualities everyone should seek and embrace as they reach for the results they desire around performance, productivity and profits.

Let’s take a deeper look at these qualities.

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About the Author

Robert Thompson is the author of The Offsite: A Leadership Challenge Fable. To learn more about Agile BalanceTM, contact Robert at [email protected], follow him on Twitter @RobertHThompson or subscribe to his Leadership Path newsletter at www.leaderinsideout.com.

Want to learn more about Robert Thompson and The Offsite? Listen to the StrategyDriven Podcast interview during which Robert shares with us his insights on the unique leadership challenges associated with today’s business environment.

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StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 45 – An Interview with Sharon Armstrong, author of The Essential Performance Review Handbook

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StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 45 – An Interview with Sharon Armstrong, author of The Essential Performance Review Handbook explores how to conduct personnel performance reviews that are a positive experience for employees and that helps them and the organization excel. During our discussion, Sharon Armstrong, author of The Essential Performance Review Handbook: A Quick and Handy Resource For Any Manager or HR Professional and Founder of Sharon Armstrong and Associates, shares with us her insights and illustrative examples regarding:

  • what is at the heart of manager and employee anxiety over personnel performance reviews
  • why some managers and employees approach the performance review process with a high degree of cynicism
  • key principles and methods managers and employees should practice when preparing, executing, and following-up on performance reviews
  • the most effective periodicity for conducting performance reviews
  • how executives and managers can ensure performance ratings are consistently defined and applied

Additional Information

In addition to the outstanding insights Sharon shares in The Essential Performance Review Handbook and this special edition podcast are the resources accessible from her websites, www.SharonArmstrongAndAssociates.com and www.TheEssentialPerformanceReviewHandbook.com.   Sharon’s book, The Essential Performance Review Handbook, can be purchased by clicking here.

About the Author

Sharon Armstrong, author of The Essential Performance Review Handbook and The Essential HR Handbook, is the Founder of Sharon Armstrong and Associates. Sharon has served as director of human resources at a law firm and several other organizations in Washington, DC. Since launching her own consulting business in 1998, she has provided training and completed HR projects dealing with performance management design and implementation for a wide variety of clients. To read Sharon’s complete biography, click here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:41 — 42.2MB)

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Leading Through Turbulent Times

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While working as senior talent leaders for a global organization that went through a 2.5 billion dollar scandal (not counting peripheral damages) when the Chairman confessed to “cooking the books” causing the near bankruptcy and closure of the company, we had the opportunity to observe and be a part of culture’s true influence. During turbulent times, like those we have been going through, leadership is not determined by rank but by the strength of the talent and conviction to build the relationships necessary to bring about collaboration and seek solutions. In our situation, leaders came from all areas and from all levels. There was desire, but without knowledge, they required continuous guidance. This is a must-start, high-impact area for learning and development. Learning professionals communicate with leaders, provide advice on how to lead during turbulence, and make available rapid skill enhancement. One such area where learning professionals can have tremendous impact is by educating (yes we mean educating) leaders about how much they influence their organizational culture.

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About the Authors

Ed Cohen & Priscilla Nelson, partners at Nelson Cohen Global Consulting ( www.nelsoncohen.com), provide thought leadership and strategic guidance to leaders and companies around the world. They are co-authors of Riding the Tiger: Leading Through Learning in Turbulent Times (www.ridingthetiger.com) published by ASTD 2010.

Ed has worked in more than 40 countries with organizations including Booz Allen Hamilton, Satyam, Seer Technologies, National Australia Bank, Larson & Toubro and the World Economic Forum. He is the only Chief Learning Officer to lead two companies to ASTD BEST Award #1 ranking; Booz Allen Hamilton and Satyam Computer Services (only company outside United States to achieve this).
 
Pris has 30 years of experience with Fortune 500 companies around the world. She has received international acclaim for her work in global leadership development, diversity and executive coaching.

The Business of Innovation – The Human Element

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Innovation is the introduction of new things or methods and is the life blood of business today. Innovative companies realize remarkable marketplace rewards. The challenge before leaders is how to inspire their workforce to use the full measure of their creative power to advance the organization in new and better ways.

The Business of Innovation is a five part series created by CNBC in association with IBM. Within each episode, Maria Bartiromo and a distinguished panel of guests discuss what it takes to be an innovation leader.

Capitalism at the Crossroads – Becoming Indigenous

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Becoming Indigenous

The Monsanto experience holds an important lesson: If corporate sustainability strategies are narrowly construed, they will fall seriously short. It is not enough to develop revolutionary technology with the potential to leapfrog currently unsustainable methods. Antiglobalization demonstrators have made it apparent that if corporate expansion is seen to endanger local autonomy, it will encounter vigorous resistance. Multinationals seeking new growth strategies to satisfy shareholders increasingly hear concerns from many quarters about consumer monoculture, labor rights, and cultural hegemony. As long as multinational corporations persist in being outsiders—alien to both the cultures and the ecosystems within which they do business—it will be difficult for them to realize their full commercial, let alone social, potential.

Today corporations are being challenged to rethink global strategies in which one-size-fits-all products are produced for the global market using world-scale production facilities and supply chains. Even so-called locally responsive strategies are often little more than pre-existing corporate solutions tailored to “fit” local markets: Technologies are frequently transferred from the corporate lab and applied in unfamiliar cultural and environmental settings; unmet needs in new markets are identified through demographic (secondary) data. The result is stillborn products and inappropriate business models that fail to effectively address real needs. As GE CEO Jeff Immelt recently noted, existing large corporations will be pre-empted by more nimble local players from the developing world unless they learn how to innovate from the ground up—what he calls “reverse innovation.”38

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About the Author

Stuart L. Hart, author of Capitalism at the Crossroads, is the Samuel C. Johnson Chair of Sustainable Global Enterprise and Professor of Management at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management. Professor Hart is one of the world’s top authorities on the implications of sustainable development and environmentalism for business strategy. He has published over 50 papers and authored or edited five books. His article “Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World” won the McKinsey Award for Best Article in the Harvard Business Review for 1997 and helped launch the movement for corporate sustainability. To read Stuart’s complete biography, click here.