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Two Tales of Business Agility
Too often, agility is equated to digitalization, as is agile transformation to digital transformation. Admittedly, the two are often related, but not per se. I stumbled upon two articles on CNN Money that illustrate my point.
The first tells us how it all went wrong for American department store chain JCPenney: https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/29/news/companies/jcpenney-department-stores/index.html
The story describes how Penney’s trouble started more than a decade ago, struggling to bring back the shoppers it lost to cheaper sellers during the recession following the banking crisis. An important quote from the article: “Without testing shoppers’ reactions first, Penney changed its advertisements, its logo, its store designs and its pricing model […]”. As much as it is part of the profession of marketing, measurement is also part of the realm of agile. Continuous improvement can only be accomplished in an empirical manner if you start with measuring and continue doing so along the way. If you start changing things without measuring your starting point first — in this case, your customers’ attitude towards your brand — you’re running around in the dark, bound to hit a wall.
Continuous improvement…
