Leveraging a Firm's Flexibility and Agility

In this book, Dr Okanga seeks to echo Teece's fundamental argument that the development of a dynamic enterprise is critical for leveraging its sustainability in the increasingly discontinuous contemporary business world. However, the book deviates from this argument through an argument that it is not the actual process of improving a firm's absorptive, dynamic and adaptive capabilities that instigate its flexibility and agility to spur improved absorptive, dynamic and adaptive capabilities. Instead, it is the pre-developed level of strategic, structural, resource, operational and technological flexibilities and agility that spawn a firm's ability to easily reconfigure and modify its endogenous capabilities as well as micro-foundations to dynamically absorb and adapt to the emerging industry and market discontinuities and unpredictabilities. Without well pre-developed agility and flexibility capabilities, most paradoxes of absorptive, dynamic and adaptive capabilities' improvement initiatives often still arise from certain latent underlying inertia, rigidities and inflexibilities ingrained in systems and business models used for over decades.