Agility / Evidence-based Management and their role in improving returns in the Private Equity Ecosystem

In this article, I’ll explore the need for and the attributes of an agile business operating system related to Private Equity (PE) portfolio companies. It hopefully helps leaders of such companies and PE professionals focused on the operations side expand their perspective on what “Agile” and “Agility” mean in their world and how they can help them improve returns realized in their investments.

Dealing with common business challenges through agility

I’ve been helping companies improve their operations for more than a decade now. A repeating pattern is where a very successful company is facing growing pains affecting its ability to scale to the next level. Some examples of the challenges I’m called in to help with:

• Losing the Ability to Innovate You often see companies that grow successfully to the point where it seems their ability to innovate stalls. When you look deeper, you see them struggling to cope with growing technical complexity, coordination costs across teams, and leadership bottlenecks. This affects product innovation as well as GTM innovation and other key business processes.
• Time to Market / Time to Learn — The more complex the organization, the more time it takes to deliver value or close a learning loop. And in an environment of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, this hurts your ability to…