Discover fresh perspectives and research insights from LBS
Think at London Business School: fresh ideas and opinions from LBS faculty and other experts direct to your inbox
Sign upStrategic agility: a game of two halves?
Organisations need to move fast, with leaders who can pivot. Look beyond corporate role models for inspiration, says John Dore
Improving strategic agility is one of the capabilities most often highlighted by corporate clients of executive education. CEOs clearly see the value of investment in developing agile leaders, who can adapt swiftly and with confidence to changing circumstances. Yet it seems a fiendishly difficult quality for leaders to harness and their organisations to unleash.
This demand for agility is not just a personal requirement – it’s institutional. For large enterprises, pursuing ambitious strategies requires an ability to pivot quickly in response to new markets, embracing and scaling new initiatives, driving innovation and pursuing digital transformation. But whether at a leadership or an organisational level, such agility is often very difficult to find and harder still to maintain.
A story in two halves about Barclays illustrates why such agility is hard to engender, and where new inspiration may have been simply missed.
The first half: Barclays goes for agility
In 2000, Barclays, the banking group in the UK, was looking tired with its retail business overreliant on a defunct counter service model. Barclays needed capital for refurbishment, new acquisitions and the rapacious demands of its ambitious investment banking arm. Under the leadership of its new CEO Matthew Barrett, Barclays undertook a huge internal restructuring programme breaking up four major divisions to create 26 Strategic Business Units. At an organisational and financial reporting level, this disaggregation of the business was a massive and unsettling undertaking.
The markets were initially sceptical of Barratt’s puritanical “economic value based” approach, but he enthused employees with his vision of Barclays dumping its “supertanker” inflexibility and unleashing “a flotilla of speedboats”, each able to pursue market, customer and new business opportunities with agility. Within his first two years, Barratt took this vision on the road, speaking to more than 14,000 employees at events in the United Kingdom, Paris, New York, Madrid, and Lisbon. But measuring value creation at a business unit level was not his biggest problem. He needed a large cohort of leaders confident and equipped to steer their part of the flotilla.
