This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. Well, one thing the last sixteen or a week dealing with the shutdown of our economy because of the virus has taught us all is that we are learning that we need to be nimble and adapt to the problems that confront us. And Jason, we know from many industries it means transforming their businesses, and our next guest deals with that on a pretty regular basis.
She does. Indeed, Sarah Elca's partner at baine In Company, heard of it. She's also the co author of a new book called Doing Agile Right and so Understanding sort of the economy, Understanding how businesses work because it is a time of unbelievable disruption, to say the least. Sarah Jose is on the phone from Chicago. Sarah, first of all, how are you? How are is everything going in this sort of topsy turvy world for you? I'm good. Thanks for having me. It's definitely a topsy turvy world. I
think has promised to bring lots of chaos. Yeah, well timed, well timed, to say the least. So I mean, give us of the sort of lead up to this book, Um, and what made you want to dig into this particular issue. Absolutely, so, we started at about eighteen months ago, and you know, with everything that's going on in the book, actually couldn't be better times. But the impetus for the book was actually conversations that we had been having with executives around
how to drive more adaptability in the business. You know, historically, with traditional hierarchy and bureaucracy, we've gotten really good at running our business, but we haven't done as well in
terms of balancing towards changing our business. And obviously that will vary by by industry and specific company strategy, but it was really this recognition that we need to help companies figure out how to both run and change their business and then harmonize both of those without destroying either one.
It's not easy, and I feel like this goes to some extent, Um, Sarah conversation Jason I had with the former Honeywell UH CEO David Cody about this managing of kind of law in short term aspects of running a company in a business, right, because they both have different parameters, they both have different demands and needs, and yet you kind of got to do both at the same time, right, you know, short term long term is certainly one aspect of it, but another aspect would be just variability itself.
You know, if if we're trying to run our business, we're looking at routine operations, we're looking at repeatability, quality, efficiency. You know, we're trying to drive out variation. But if we want to grow and drive revenue and innovate, we're actually trying to increase variation. And so how do I allow my company to do both of those things at the same time? And there's there's really an art and
a science to that. So what was the biggest I always ask people who wrote who have written books that what was the biggest surprise along the way? Because you did so much research, you talked to so many people. I mean, is there a conversation or a data point or something that you and your co authors came across where you thought, Wow, I did not see that coming. You know. A funny one is that the book publishing process is decidedly not agile. It is the worst. That's
the worst, I will say it. And it's even stronger than you like. It is the most antiquated backwards like mind bending like you just can't even get your head around it, and you you're talking to people and you're like, are you serious right now? It's amazing And I have to say sorry, Jason will do it because he's pretty humble, but he's written two books, so he knows his firsthand
as well. Yeah, so you absolutely know that. I would say from an insight standpoint, one of the interesting things is that the companies that are actually further along on this journey and have really mastered how to drive adaptability with speed are also really strong learning organizations. They're very customer centric, and they would say that they're still on
the journey. So no one is declaring victory. And the companies that are actually more in that direction would say they just see so much more, much much more further that they have to go um and so it's just interesting that they would declare themselves as not in the lead because they see the potential. So, Sarah, as Carol pointed out, you have a lot of experience in retail. Retail has been unbelievably disrupted here. What happens next? Yeah,
it's a great question. Fortunately I don't have a crystal ball, but what I can tell you is the disruption that we're experiencing is a lot of acceleration of what we've already been seeing in retail, those store closures, bankruptcies, you know, the increase in e commerce and the need to you know, transform their business pretty much top to bottom. Uh. You know, what we saw with COVID is probably a two to
three year acceleration in in e commerce penetration curves. Uh. What we're also seeing that's different with COVID is a heightened, uh, sense of focus on customer experience. We know that when we're in a time of recovery, customers pay more attention to where their dollars go, and you end up seeing greater share shift and so the winners win more and the losers lose more. You know. It's just such an
interesting time. UM. And I know you guys in this book, you know, just look at a lot of different worlds and have talked to a lot of different leaders. I do wonder a lot more to about the retail environment, which is an area that you've worked within. I mean, what do you expect, like, what does retail look like?
I don't know is it I don't even know what the time frame is because I know it's continuing to evolve, but it just feels like we're seeing a lot of fallout because of the shutdown, like those that were the most vulnerable. But what do you think it looks like, Sarah in a few years. I think we'll continue to see some fallout. There will be companies that are able to make the transformation journey that they have the resources in order to be able to invest in. There are
companies that won't make it. And I think the key difference is going to be adaptability. Uh. And so you know, back to agile and how do you build this agile business stone. You need to be able to have a leadership, mindset and focus that puts the customer first and really drives home that customer centricity that focuses on prototyping solutions with strong feedback loops and being able to scale those
and and roll those out to meet customer needs. So, Sarah, as you talked to CEOs as they're going through this right now, I mean, we talked to so many CEOs all the time, and it does feel like something different is going on in board rooms and something transformational is happening. There's a huge amount of self reflection the pandemic obviously
has made us all a bit more self reflective. And I think especially those of us who were fortunate too, and we say this all the time, fortunate to have jobs, fortunate to you know, be in a position where we can work from home, where we have childcare in many cases, and we have the ability to to to take the time to to self reflect. Is that happening to the extent that we hope it is in in boardrooms or are too many ceo is just saying we just got to get through this. No, I think it's starting to
happen in terms of the reflection. We're shifting from sort of this uh need to act and respond, almost in crisis mode too. Now how do we retool our business? And so what we're seeing is this shift from what I'll call sporadic agile into systematic agile, meaning how do I build that into my company for the long term.
Because CEOs are reflecting and and a lot of them are saying that they've never been more proud of their people, you know, They've they focus on specific missions in response to the crisis, They've come together in new ways, often cross functionally. They're working together differently and they've achieved great things.
Now how do we do that again and again and again. Yeah, I mean that's the thing, you know, in terms of I also do wonder too when you say that how many companies will be because of the pressures that are going to be on them, that they're going to have to, once again, like coming off the financial crisis, have to do more with less, and what pressures that put on workers as they're trying to potentially transform their companies. Yeah, I mean, certainly you're going to have to have an
investment capacity in order to you know, fund technology and data. Uh, you know, make the investments that you need. You know, at Banning Company, we spent a lot of time looking at recovering retooling, and you know, those that invest through the recovery often, uh, you know, have strategic advantage coming
out of the recovery. You know, now is the time to invest, Now is the time to be customer centric and and that adaptability for those for those companies that do that, you know they will be the ones to win. All right. Sarah Elk, thank you so much. Congrats on the book Doing Agile Right. She's a partner at Banning Company. Join us on the phone from Chicago