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Agile companies execute faster than competitors when AI, geopolitics, regulatory uncertainty, and macroeconomic shocks punish laggards. The most agile companies earn twice the returns of the S&P 500. CultureX helps companies measurably improve their strategic agility.
Built on our research into what sets the world’s most agile companies apart from their peers, the Index analyzes four million online employee reviews to measure strategic agility across nearly 2,000 companies and 48 industries.
In twenty-five years of research and client work, we’ve identified six aspects of an organization that accelerate execution, or slow it down.
Everyone acts like they have a personal interest.
Decentralized decision-making speeds execution by putting decisions in the hands of people closest to the facts on the ground. Decentralization only works when employees take initiative, hold themselves and others accountable for results, and act in the company’s long-term interest. In other words, they act like owners.
Read more →Smart, hardworking, talented people.
Companies that attract, develop, and retain top talent are better equipped to seize the opportunities and mitigate the threats that emerge from turbulent markets. Another advantage: senior leaders are more willing to delegate critical decisions to employees whose capabilities they trust.
Read more →Everyone on the same page.
A clear strategy provides the prioritization and focus required for fast execution. Leaders throughout the organization must understand the strategy and their role in executing it, so their work aligns with where the company is going. Agility without shared strategic context devolves into chaos.
Read more →Minimal bureaucracy and barriers.
Red tape, bureaucracy, and dependencies slow execution even when strategy is clear and employees are trying to act like owners. Companies can reduce structural sources of complexity — by clarifying decision rights, minimizing dependencies, and cutting through red tape — or improve processes to more effectively manage what remains.
Read more →People can speak the truth to get to the right place.
Fast execution requires candid conversations in every direction — bottom-up, top-down, and peer-to-peer. Front-line employees and middle managers must feel safe surfacing what’s not working early enough for course correction. Senior leaders must provide frank assessments and honest performance feedback. Peers need hard discussions about competing priorities and resource trade-offs.
Read more →Never stop trying to be better.
Strategic agility bears the seeds of its own demise. Agile companies succeed, and their success generates complacency that saps the urgency required to out-execute rivals. Sustaining strategic agility requires that leaders maintain urgency and a relentless dissatisfaction with the status quo.
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Being AI-native allows us to execute on our globally recognized agility thought leadership more effectively and at a fraction of the cost of traditional consulting firms. Our ideas, straight to you: that’s the promise of AI.
Our framework is grounded in decades of empirical research across countries, industries, and environmental shocks, which have been published in four books, ten best-selling Harvard Business Review articles, and the MIT Strategic Agility Project. We’ve road-tested our approach with the top teams of more than 100 leading global organizations and teaching hundreds of executives at London Business School and MIT Sloan.
Our award-winning AI platform developed at MIT measures more than 400 granular aspects of leadership behavior, corporate culture, and organizational processes — drawn from data your company already has. It benchmarks you against industry peers to identify the highest-leverage opportunities to improve strategic agility, pinpoints where to intervene, and tracks progress over time.
Most efforts to improve agility focus narrowly on specific processes, such as sprints or OKRs. Our approach addresses the bigger picture — the six contextual drivers that together shape the behaviors that either accelerate or hinder execution.
We give your leaders a framework grounded in cutting-edge research, a highly tailored diagnostic, curated recommendations based on what we’ve learned from the most agile companies, and deep, hands-on support as they implement. . We help the leaders accountable for results to execute more effectively, rather than try to do the job for them and leave once the engagement’s done.
By leveraging AI to pinpoint granular opportunities to accelerate execution,, coaching rather than replacing your leaders, and maintaining a lean organization, we can deliver measurable improvements in strategic agility at a fraction of the cost of traditional management consultancies. We charge for the value we add, not the hours we bill.
CultureX’s research on strategic agility, published in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, The Economist, and elsewhere.
Across our index of nearly 2,000 companies and 48 industries, a small set of organizations stand head and shoulders above their peers on all six dimensions of strategic agility and also outperform the S&P 500 by 2x on average. Over the coming year, CultureX is publishing a study of what they do differently — including conversations with their CEOs and other top leaders.
Sign up to learn more about the Culture Champions project.
Recognized by The Economist as global experts in culture, execution, and AI, Don and Charlie founded CultureX to rigorously measure strategic agility and help companies win in turbulent markets. Their proprietary AI platform is built on decades of empirical research and has helped dozens of leading firms make their organizations measurably more agile.
Professor of the Practice at MIT Sloan, where he teaches courses on formulating and executing strategy. Don has been studying organizational agility and execution for thirty years, has written four books and ten best-selling Harvard Business Review articles, directs the Strategic Agility Project at MIT, and has advised the executive teams of more than 100 leading companies.
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Charlie is the co-author of the most-read series in MIT Sloan Management Review’s 67-year history, a Harvard Business Review cover story, and recent invited pieces in The Economist. He developed the award-winning cultural measurement AI platform that powers CultureX engagement and research, and has advised the executive teams of dozens of leading companies.
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