The New Nimble: Leading in the Age of Change

By Jay Sullivan

Transform your organization into an adaptable and flexible innovator

In The New Nimble: Leading in the Age of Change, accomplished author, professor, and consultant Jay Sullivan delivers a clear, tangible, and actionable guide to implementing flexibility and creativity in your enterprise. Through interviews with senior leaders from a variety of industries and disciplines, the author shows you the trends and behaviors that allowed successful companies to navigate the constantly changing realities and complexities of the COVID-19 crisis.

The book demonstrates how the most adaptable firms internalized and institutionalized lessons from the health emergency and applied those lessons to their everyday operations. You’ll discover:

• How to go beyond economic, business, and industry trends to make decisions based on immediately relevant—and rapidly changing—demands
• How to deal with pushback from staff, clients, and the public as you make the changes you need to make in your company
• Ways to apply the lessons from the COVID-19 crisis to the next unexpected and unpredictable emergency

An essential and practical handbook for managers, executives, founders, directors, entrepreneurs, and other business leaders doing their best to manage their way through chaotic and volatile environments, The New Nimble is the hands-on leadership guide for a new world that we’ve all been waiting for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Sep 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781394185436

Book preview

Title: The New Nimble: Leading in the Age of Change by Jay Sullivan

Copyright © 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Sullivan, Jay, 1962- author.

Title: The new nimble : leading in the age of change / by Jay Sullivan.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2024] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023024953 (print) | LCCN 2023024954 (ebook) | ISBN 9781394185412 (hardback) | ISBN 9781394185429 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781394185436 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Organizational change. | Leadership.

Classification: LCC HD58.8 .S86 2024 (print) | LCC HD58.8 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/06—dc23/eng/20230721

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023024953

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023024954

Cover Design Concept: Jay Sullivan

To Mom and Dad.

Thank you for giving me a solid, stable footing in life.

And to my children, John, Sam, Teresa, and Magdalen.

Thank you for always keeping me on my toes.

INTRODUCTION: THE NEW NIMBLE – LEADING IN THE AGE OF CHANGE

We're all a little bit Martha.

For more than 15 years, my wife, Mary, and I have hosted a neighborhood open-house holiday party. We missed 2019 because a family member was sick, and then 2020 because the entire world was sick. By the fall of 2021, with the hint of the world returning to normal, we decided it was time to try again.

We set the date for December 19, rented two tall space heaters for the patio so people could stay outdoors if that made them feel safer, suggested people should only come if they were vaccinated, and started making Mary's signature fudge. About a week after we mailed the invitations, Omicron reared its ugly head. As the date of the party drew closer and the news of another Covid spike grew more worrisome, a few regrets trickled in. Mary thought we should cancel the party. I wanted to move forward.

On December 16, still not sure what to do, we got a call from Martha, a sweet, elderly neighbor up the street. Martha is a wise and sound voice of reason who ran the annual science fair at the high school here in Pleasantville, New York. She and her husband, Chuck, had always attended our party and enjoyed the chance to catch up with so many people at once.

After a simple, Hi, Mary. It's Martha. She got to the point. "I got your invitation. ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MINDS!" She launched into a polite but firm tirade about the dangers of the disease, the threat to everyone right before the holidays, and the likelihood we would be hosting a super-spreader event.

Mary assured her we had space outside and that we were confident that people would only attend if they were vaccinated. In any case, Mary emphasized, we mailed the invitations before Omicron burst on the scene.

Martha shared how much she had missed seeing everyone lately, but still insisted that this was a bad idea and that we were irresponsible for moving forward with the party. She ended hurriedly with a frustrated, Well, look, don't take us off the list because we still might come, but this is crazy, and hung up.

For three years, the entire world has been a little bit Martha, and a little bit Mary and Jay – not sure what to do, what information to weigh, what personal interests to weigh, how to make our decisions, and how to have confidence in our next steps. If we could, we delayed our decisions until we had some – even if not enough – information. If our decisions couldn't wait, we plowed ahead on whatever information we had. The pandemic changed so much of our lives and the way we made decisions. It forced us to abandon old ways of doing things and figure out and adopt novel approaches to connecting with each other and the various aspects of our lives.

But the pandemic only highlighted and exacerbated what's been happening in our personal and business lives for more than a decade. Those of us in leadership roles have been asked to make decisions faster, with both too much and not enough information, and with consequences that then lead to even more decisions. The only thing faster than the pace of our decisions has been the blowback from whoever didn't like the decisions. It sounds like a no-win situation. Welcome to leadership.

For the last 25+ years, I've had the privilege of both leading my own firm, and coaching business leaders on their communication skills, either in one-on-one sessions or in group classes. I have listened to thousands of professionals talk about the changes they incorporated into their work and personal lives. We've talked through how they can explain their new plans, their company's revised objectives, and their strategy for the moment, all while their situations remained in flux. We've had those conversations in the face of changing economic situations, changing regulations for their industry, and, most recently, an attack on our democracy, a war in Europe, and a global pandemic.

With each major event a company or team faced, the leader would talk about achieving a new normal. The great frustration for everyone seemed to be that once they felt they had the situation figured out, the rules would change. They would have to start all over again. It became apparent that our new normal was actually all of us learning to achieve a new nimble.

A new normal suggests we have achieved a new plateau, a place of stasis and stability, albeit at a place we don't really know yet. Ditch that idea. Please. We're in The New Nimble, where we will need to constantly adapt to change and to changing standards.

We've all become accustomed to making decisions in a fluid environment. The rules keep changing, the factors to consider become more complex, or, in some cases, completely out of control, and the structural underpinnings of how we think about issues no longer apply.

That shift isn't about just one aspect of our lives. It's not just about new rules about working remotely; that's just the business issue du jour. The real shift is about how business leaders are issuing definitive directives on Monday, and then backtracking on Tuesday because of the social media response from employees. It's about believing deeply in the stability and integrity of our democratic institutions one day and having doubts the next. It's about not just surface changes regarding how we attend meetings, but philosophical changes to how we relate to our employers and our colleagues.

In 2020, the terms social distancing and essential worker entered the world's vocabulary. Many of us, me included, humbly learned how non-essential the world considered us. Well prior to that, the Me Too movement and heightened awareness about racial injustice caused many of us to realize we needed to rethink our thinking – not about a particular topic, but literally about how to think.

We each have honed our analytic abilities from our education and life experiences. Mine come from two distinct privileges. I practiced law for nine years, first in the public interest sphere and then at a large corporate law firm. Prior to law school, I taught English grammar at a boys’ high school in Kingston, Jamaica. I was able to share important grammar nuggets and my own grammar neuroses not only with my students, but to help my own four kids through high school and college. (Oddly, they were never as grateful as I would have thought.) The dual disciplines of law and grammar form the way I think through problems and structure ideas. All of the people you'll meet in this book have their own reasons for solving problems the way they do, and their own instincts for communicating their ideas for your benefit.

During Covid, many of us became more nimble in how to deal with an avalanche of work, as roles shifted and new demands arose. Others found themselves with too much time on their hands and became nimbler at finding ways to contribute to a world in pain. Regardless of which camp you found yourself in, we all needed to figure out how to be more nimble leaders in the unexpected world in which we found ourselves.

Having coached thousands of professionals dealing with an ever-changing landscape, I have observed similarities and differences in how leaders have made decisions in The New Nimble. I have gathered here the experiences of nine organizations or individuals, each from a different industry or profession. There are common elements that impact each entity's ability to succeed. There are also nuanced differences that give each unique challenges and advantages. Their experiences, insights, and innovations hold lessons for all of us as we learn to adapt, adjust, and evolve in rapidly changing times.

The cast of characters you'll meet on the following pages will give you insight into the specific challenges facing their industries and professions.

Universities have to adapt to new ways of teaching. But that's the least of their challenges. The remote learning model forced on us all by Covid raised questions about why we gather in person at college at all. What's the added learning we experience by coming together? Is it worth the cost? More importantly, a changing demographic in the United States will dramatically impact how universities approach recruiting and retaining students and position their value. The ivy on their walls was always taken as a sign of stability and permanence. Now, the discussions and decisions within those walls require nimble maneuvering to stay relevant and stay open.

Those in the supply chain struggle to keep our store shelves stocked and our machine parts at the ready. But pandemics, wars, and the occasional surveillance balloon disrupt supply chains or heighten concern that the links in those chains might snap. Our product delivery systems have to work with simultaneous challenges of too much of some products and not enough of others.

The staff at hospitals and homeless shelters alike are inundated with sick and suffering sisters and brothers who need care and compassion. During the pandemic, in particular, they did so while just as frightened and uncertain as everyone else. In a world where displaced persons is becoming part of the demographic profile, those institutions need to adapt more nimbly than ever before. Whether your own city's downtrodden population is in need or care, or someone just bussed a few hundred homeless people to your doorstep, you're now conscious of reacting in the moment to crises that simply didn't exist a few years ago.

Consulting firms have helped their clients through industry disruptions, mergers and acquisitions, and economic uncertainty. In recent years, the pace of change has quickened, and the changes themselves have provoked fundamental existential questions for those firms and their clients alike. The world experienced a marked increase in the number of people changing jobs, employers, and even industries, causing added stress on institutions and individuals.

In the United States, our confidence in the rule of law and in the reliability of our institutions had been shaken in recent months and years. It reached a precipice on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, and shocked us all.

In the meantime, our most public of enterprises – professional sports associations – hold up the mantra of the show must go on. But they do so on a stage that both expects but-only-sometimes welcomes their stars to weigh in on important issues of the day.

We all have our own challenges and triumphs as we navigate through an ever-changing landscape. We all figure out how to set the tone for our organizations and create new processes for dealing with crises. We each have our own failures. Our collective success will be defined by how we learn from each other's experiences. We foster creativity and innovation for ourselves and our organizations, in part, by looking beyond how our industry or company functions. I intentionally chose a diverse set of industries in the hope that successes in one field might provide inspiration for leaders in other fields.

These stories and the lessons for all of us fall into three categories.

Understand Your Essence,

Ask the Right Questions, and

Be Bold.

By understanding how these three elements come into play as we make decisions, we'll be better able to remain nimble both in times of crisis and in the normal levels of craziness we all experience.

Understand Your Essence

Being nimble is about being both able to pivot and knowing when to do so. We can't pivot if we don't have a starting point. Each of the organizations profiled here is highly conscious of its identity, its reason for being, and how it adds value to the world. Knowing our own essence allows us to move both deftly and strategically in a way many others cannot.

Ask the Right Questions

One of the key drivers of success during times of tumult is the right mix of confidence and humility. Without confidence, we become paralyzed. Without humility, we rush forward blindly. Humility requires accepting that we don't have all of the answers and that we need input from those around us. Asking the right questions of the right people at the right time has proven a hallmark of success for the groups you'll read about. If we put the right structures in place, we can gather the right information when we need it. If we then trust our sources, we know when to dig deeper and when to act on what's in front of us.

Be Bold

To lead, we must make decisions