The Elastic Journey: Winning Through Flexibility (Smart Monday/Process)

Hello, I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing.  Today is Smart Monday, and I am going to introduce you to a concept called The Elastic Enterprise.  It’s based on a new book and is all about winning through flexibility.

Before I talk about being flexible in a business environment, let’s talk about the human body for a moment.  To be physically fit a body needs a strong heart, strong muscles and also flexibility.  Even if you have a strong heart and strong muscles if you aren’t flexible your body is going to break down.

The same thing is true with a business.  You may have a great team and operations which relates to the strong heart.  You may have a wonderful product or service which relates to the strong body.  But if you aren’t flexible and have the ability to be scalable and adaptable, your body, or your business, is going to break down.

The book I want you to seek out, The Elastic Enterprise, has been written by Nick Vitalari who is a former college professor that taught me at University of California, Irvine and Hayden Shaughnessy who is a contributing writer to Forbes.

They looked at companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, General Electric, Caterpillar and Deere and wondered why these companies were succeeding, and in fact growing, in down economies.  What they determined is the basis for The Elastic Enterprise.

The commonality among these companies is that they were able to be successfully in bad times and they were also transformative, meaning that they were not only doing business but they were changing how business was being done.

In summary, an elastic enterprise is truly flexible, aggressively seeks out change and is driven by what the book call Sapient Leadership.  That leadership is able to leverage the people around them, even partners and their customers, to bring about this change.

Tomorrow we are going to talk about what that means for your business and what you can do to have that elastic journey.

That concludes Smart Monday.  Join us tomorrow for Strategic Tuesday when we will continue our conversation about The Elastic Enterprise.  To discuss an online or face to face service engagement and enhance the marketing and branding for your organization, contact James Glover: (505) 501-1330 or onceadaymarketing@gmail.com.  I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing and we’ll see you next time.