“Be capable of adapting to change caused by the technology is the new paradigm of management to prevail and stand out in an environment increasingly more competitive”.

Lucas Carné is a member of the management board of Barcelona Tech City, has more than 13 years of experience in areas of leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation, it’s also the co-founder of Privalia, one the most successful e-commerce of the country, it was sold to the French company, Vente Priveé. 

His wide experience has allowed him to talk about recommendations that an entrepreneur must consider so that his company be more agile.

LUCAS CARNÉ: NINE PRINCIPLES SO THAT THE COMPANIES CAN BE MORE AGILE

Customer centricity:  is when the client is the most important, that is to say, within the company should be thinking how the decisions made will impact the value to the client; how they will improve the value proposition; how they will reinforce the brand promise; how they will eliminate each point of friction on the product’s service.

Share purpose: is based in having a common purpose that is really important. In other words, it’s the moment where the CEO must think: what does the company really does; which are its objectives and how they think execute them. That is to say, what makes them important, why the users choose their company over the others. They have to define their priorities.

Focus and simpliclity: Carné uses the next quotes to explain this principle:

• “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” Leonardo Da Vinci.
• “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” Albert Einstein.
• “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains”. Steve Jobs

In other words, focus is the art of saying no. Having a good focus leads you directly to prioritization.

Prioritization: they must be radical on the prioritization. A vice that most of the companies have is that they do things in parallel, meaning, when you talk to CEOs and ask them about the focus, they tell you they have it clear, but you ask the employees and you realise they don’t know how to prioritize. According to Carné, we must raise the next questions: what’s the priority? what causes more impact? 

Parallelism and autonomy: it means be capable of having groups in parallel, of autonomous way. That means the group can do a thing from the beginning to t end, without having the need of looking for help from another person. For it, the ideal must be that the groups have a leader, an objective and a key performance indicator. Everything is included inside the accountability principle, that means the condition of being accountable; responsible. Added to this process is the importance of trust within a team. There can be no autonomy if there is no confidence.

Interactivity: it implies that an agile company is when gets the way of learning in fast and continuous way. That means that every well or service that be offer, should be released to the market as soon as possible. Also, they have to make accompaniment to the costumer, to verify the expected results. This process must be constant and sustainable, meaning, working with short and fast cycles. Based on this, they should take decisions, so they have a better result.

Rituals: it applies to the companies who work with short cycles, they focus on the client and have autonomous groups. When they manage short cycles, it demands a bigger impact, and this calculates with instruments that measure the efficiency of the proposal strategies. Likewise, at the end of the cycle, he recommends celebrating the success if the objective has been accomplished. To Carné, that is something that few companies do. On your part, when is the other way around, it must learn about them and turn the page.

Data: “The facts support with information, what cannot be measured, cannot be managed”, claims Carné. The three to five years business plans don’t work, because nowadays the things change really fast when they agree objectives; these change at the end of the process, for that matter, they must avoid long plans and maintain the 12 months visibility; likewise happens with annual budget. That’s why, the company must be clear about its identity, its goals and the aspects to be improved. There is element that will make them different of the others.

Technology and data in each Group: to have autonomous groups, each one them must have their own technology and database. According to Carné, sometimes the groups can interfere with the others, however, the important thing is to handle them. This is what differentiates a company that is not agile, from one that is.  Also they must know that every time they cycles become shorter, thus, the technological companies can’t think that for having a new technology or platform, next year the Capex will be reduce, this means expenditure that a company turns into a fixed asset, in order to generate benefits.

REQUIREMENTS OF AN AGILE COMPANY

To Carné these are the requirements that they must have to achieve that a company can be agile:

• Avoid hierarchy
• Generate impact
• Be adaptable
• Have engagement
• Change the functionality
• Don’t scare the risk

The nine principles mention beforehand are related mainly with organisational culture, it means, that can be apply to every company, it’s not necessary that company should be technological. At the end the objective is to make the things different to obtain different and better results.