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Agility in People
Often, people will ask me "what do you mean when you say that companies need to be agile?" In the simplest form, agility means that you can and do respond quickly to take advantage of market opportunities and avoid threats. It's done by meeting fluctuating demand, while still maintaining your quality levels and minimizing your costs. Agility is quick moving, nimble and active.
We've come a long way from the days of Henry Ford and his famous remark of "people can have the Model T in any color as long as it is black." To meet fluctuating or custom demand, you must make changes to your strategy, operations and products with speed and ease. From a manufacturing perspective, some companies have been able to rapidly transfer technical specifications from R&D to internal manufacturing. Contract manufacturing companies, who sometimes bear the brunt of these requests, often own capabilities that don't exist in the product developer's manufacturing organization.
At the core of those two examples is agility. Agility is fueled by creativity. Where does the creativity come from? Your people! You cant get anywhere unless your people fill the "GAP." Your team needs to be:
G - Generative - generates new ideas, teach others and continue to learn.
A - Adaptive - assume multiple roles, rapidly redeploy and collaborate.
P - Proactive - initiate and improvise.
Being able to develop a perfectly simple solution to a business problem is at the heart of agility in people. This isn't to say that process and technology aren't important. They are critical. However, agile organizations also leverage their people. People pulling together in the same direction, and using "how they think" instead of "what they know" gives agile organizations a competitive advantage. These companies are using the most basic, yet sometimes most evasive resource for companies, an agile response. | 
