Revitalizing Strategic Agility in a Turbulent Environment: A Conceptual Discourse

This paper conceptually examined revitalizing strategic agility in a turbulent environment. In the current turbulent and highly competitive environment of today, agility, that is the ability of organizations to quickly sense and respond to environmental changes, is an important determinant of organizational success. With the advancement of information technologies, company strategy focuses nowadays on sustainable competitive advantage, and gives importance to short-term advantages of flexibility and fast response. In the unpredictable and competitive world of today, organizations must have different competitive features to compete; otherwise, they will move towards annihilation. One of the capabilities that organizations need in the turbulent environments of today is agility. Strategic agility is the ability to continuously and adequately adjust and adapt in appropriate time the strategic direction in core business in relation to changing circumstances. Agility provides the organization with the possibility of quick response and compatibility with environment and allows the organization to improve its efficiency. The paper is largely conceptual in nature and adopts a desk research methodology in reviewing extant literature. This study concludes that firms operating in dynamic environments must realize the need for change and adaptation and thereby stimulate their in developing agility that can better respond to a dynamic environment.

Holistic View of Intuition and Analysis in Leadership Decision-Making and Problem-Solving

Making decisions is a key task for leaders and managers. Senior leaders are currently exposed to increasing amounts of data which they must process quickly in our current dynamic world. Complex factors in the business world are not always best approached through an analytical framework. Using tacit knowledge gained through intuition can enable a more holistic understanding of the deep nature of today’s problems. This paper takes an expansive view of decision-making with intuition right at the centre and canvasses understandings of intuition arising from philosophy, psychology, Western and Eastern beliefs; and proposes a model that relates intuition to other problem-solving approaches. The paper presents the results of interviews with senior leaders who must make difficult decisions in complex turbulent environments. The interview schedule is based on questions raised in a prior literature search concerning the relationship between intuition and analysis in complexity decision-making and problem-solving, the usefulness to this group of respondents, the possibilities of combining both approaches and any conflict arising from that combination, and understandings of the concept of intuition by these respondents. The resultant model presents a visual description of a process that moves from exterior assessment achieved via sensing and analysis, through to deeper understandings and a more holistic discernment gained through intuition. The model has the potential to assist leaders faced with difficult-to-solve problems in providing a better understanding of the steps involved in tackling problems of increasing levels of complexity.

Dual-solver hybrid computational approaches for design and analysis of vertical lift vehicles

The cost of Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes simulations can be restrictive to implement in aeromechanics design and analysis of vertical lift configurations given the cost to resolve the flow on a mesh sufficient to provide accurate aerodynamic and structural loads. Dual-solver hybrid methods have been developed that resolve the configuration and the near field with the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes solvers, while the wake is resolved with vorticity-preserving methods that are more cost-effective. These dual-solver approaches can be integrated into an organisation’s workflow to bridge the gap between lower-fidelity methods and the expensive Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes when there are complex physics present. This paper provides an overview of different dual-solver hybrid methods, coupling approaches, and future efforts to expand their capabilities in the areas of novel configurations and operations in constrained and turbulent environments.

The Role of Vendor Legitimacy in IT Outsourcing Performance: Theory and Evidence

Information technology outsourcing (ITO) relationships today are facing increasingly turbulent environments. This research examines ITO performance by focusing on client firms’ perceived legitimacy of vendors, termed “vendor legitimacy,” consisting of pragmatic, cognitive, and moral dimensions. Based on our surveys with executives and managers at 200 ITO client firms, the study’s findings present the imperative to actively manage vendor legitimacy for achieving and sustaining ITO performance. Specifically, at the strategic level, clients’ perception of vendors as mutually aligned, long-term-oriented, tightly integrated partners is critical. At the operational level, clients should collaborate with vendors to design and establish interorganizational routines that undergird vendor legitimacy. At the managerial level, clients’ relational governance plays a pivotal role in attaining procedural justice, ethical standards, and fairness in the interorganizational collaboration. In sum, our study suggests that creating a dedicated corporate function or unit for continually overseeing and assessing a portfolio of vendors and swiftly identifying and responding to potential issues and crises related to vendor legitimacy would be a worthwhile investment.

Editorial: COVID-19 Chaos and Complexity in Universities

When the devastating COVID-19 pandemic struck the world, universities had to pragmatically deal with change and adaptation in order to survive. Up to now, our universities are still adapting to the change in every respect because of the pandemic which is still amongst us. We have witnessed remarkable ways in which students, staff and stakeholders have adapted to the complexities brought by the pandemic. It has been established that in organisations, there is a strong relationship between evolution, adaptation and survival. Keith Morrison in the ‘School Leadership and Complexity Theory’ discussion (2002) suggests ‘Complexity to be a theory of change and adaptation detailing how change occurs in systems as well as the principles and mindsets needed to flourish in turbulent environments’ that has not changed since 2002. Morrison’s theory is applicable to the situations our higher education institutions are in, especially now during the troubled time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Olfactory Sensing and Navigation in Turbulent Environments

Fluid turbulence is a double-edged sword for the navigation of macroscopic animals, such as birds, insects, and rodents. On one hand, turbulence enables pheromone communication among mates and the possibility of locating food by their odors from long distances. Molecular diffusion would indeed be unable to spread odors over relevant distances in natural conditions. On the other hand, turbulent flows are hard to predict, and learning effective maneuvers to navigate them is challenging, as we discuss in this review. We first provide a summary of the olfactory organs that sense airborne or surface-bound odors, as well as the computational tasks that animals face when extracting information useful for navigation from an olfactory signal. A compendium of the dynamics of turbulent transport emphasizes those aspects that directly impact animals’ behavior. The state of the art on navigational strategies is discussed, followed by a concluding section dedicated to future challenges in the field. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics, Volume 13 is March 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.