agility

In business, the ability of a company to operate profitably in a competitive environment of continually, and unpredictably, changing customer opportunities. The concept of the agile company recognizes that flexibility, combined with speed of response to market opportunities and threats, are what separate many successful companies from their competitors.

The origins of the concept are most closely associated with the work of US competitiveness expert Roger N Nagel. In Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations (1995), Nagel and co-authors, Steven Goldman and Kenneth Preiss, present agile competition as a system with four strategic dimensions: organizing to manage change and uncertainty; leveraging the impact of people and information; cooperating to enhance competitiveness; and enriching the customer.