Amid perpetual upheavals and accelerating world changes, we transition from the Experience Economy where buyers chose memorable outcomes to the Transformational Economy where buyers choose meaningful, authentic, and socially responsible outcomes.
Because your customers want to become a better version of themselves, your company must become a better version of itself.
This book's premise: the future belongs to the nimble; those able to resiliently innovate to deliver meaningful goods and services that customers seek. Being nimble makes demands beyond the traditional corporate structure and leadership strategy's ability to deliver.
This book is your essential bridge from the conventional business approaches you used to get where you are today, to flourishing in a Transformational Economy as a socially responsible business.
In it, we'll provide you with a fresh look at the root causes that limit leadership teams and offers overdue solutions that can address these causes in today's chronically volatile business environment.
Everything you'll read and consider in this book centers on bringing Nimbility to your organization.
Nimbility is the combination of high resilience and high innovation that are necessary attributes for profiting from upheavals.
Innovation is your capacity to increase the desirability, utility, and value of a product, whether it's goods or services. Resilience is your ability to recover from stress and unplanned impacts.
The obvious value of innovation is competitive performance, protecting and increasing profit margins, and corporate sustainability in a changing market. It's also way more fun. Innovation is set by culture and team rewards for looking for better ways to bring more value to the team, customers, stakeholders, and the planet.
A key value of resilience is risk reduction because it allows rapid recovery from an undesired state, reducing the cost of risk, and therefore contributing to lowered risk. Resilience is set by systems and policies that can quickly respond to change, with the necessary resources to absorb shocks and quickly recover.
Nimbility is inherently lower risk, much lower than other options, making conventional risk-taking and innovation much safer from a career and corporate perspective.
We apply the Nimbility Matrix to both your organization and the individuals involved when assessing a situation. For your organization, we look at culture, systems, procedures, processes, and policies to identify how your business rules constrain or enable resilience, and limit or foster innovation. When considering individuals, we examine their behaviors as well as their attitudes and temperaments to understand their Nimbility.
"This is a great book filled with innovative ideas and at the same time utterly readable and digestible. Bravo. The future belongs to those who overcome the current chaos and become nimble. Gruder and Smith clearly lay out the framework that includes completely rethinking the organizational structure to maximize leadership archetypes and provide the most streamlined and reliable way to ensure psychological diversity and minimize blind spots. Each chapter ends with probing questions to help critically evaluate an organization's status and begin the journey to nimbility."
- Melissa A. Smith, former Executive Director of the Institute for Ethical Leadership at Rutgers Business School, and former President of Retail, Aerosoles Inc.
"Only once in a great while do words hold tremendous power to invoke significant change. The authors, Dr. David Gruder and Mark S.A. Smith have collaborated to create a foundation for leadership in a world where the rate of change has become so exponential that it calls for an entirely new perspective in leadership. To say that we are in a transformational phase of human evolution would be an understatement, and this set of books sets the path forward in a way never before attempted at such a grand scale. We will include copies of these books in every HR package, not just for the executives."
- Mark Hewitt, Founder, NuGen Development & The Lydian Foundation
"Color me impressed! Here's why Dr. Gruder and Mr. Smith's book is so very valuable to devour: The future is coming and only the nimble, flexible, and innovative of us will contribute and prosper in that future. This book shows how to BE the Leader in these times because it is remarkably rich in detail and specific tactics and it truly inspires the reader to 'nimbly' take action. Powerfully important read."
- David M. Corbin, Mentor to Mentors, Two-time WSJ best-selling author, The Illuminated Brand, Illuminate the Negative, BrandSlaughter
"Aligning the strengths and mindset of your executive team has become critical to thriving in today's chaotic world. I have known David and Mark for many years, and they have captured in their new book what you must understand and do to predictably and successfully lead the next generation of business."
- Dr. Jeffrey Magee, CMC/CBE/CSP/PDM, Human Capital Developer, Group-Publisher & Editor-and-Chief, PERFORMANCE Magazine
"I truly loved the book! To the point, immediately useable information, with an amazing and necessary map for executives to step forward into the new corporate paradigm that already has me wondering how the old paradigm lasted this long!"
- Dail Croome, President, Grand Shrimp (decentralized food production solutions); former President & Vice President of several public & private companies
"As a successful leader of new emerging global technology businesses for 20 years, I extracted new ideas and was reminded of some I allowed to lapse. I kept going back and reading parts over again. Early in the book the authors ask: Are you willing to unlearn and relearn? This impactful statement freed me to investigate the wisdom and ideas provided without judgment. Leaders and teams will benefit immediately from this book."
- Dan Wensley, CEO, ScalePad (technology)