I was scanning old printouts and found a 2006 McKinsey Quarterly piece, Building a nimble organisation. It still sounded current. Executives were already worried about agility and speed. What got in the way then is what gets in the way now: slow decisions, unclear accountability, organisational walls, and the habits people will not drop.
The environment has changed. Technology has changed. Customers expect more, and competitors move faster. AI raises the speed at which a company can analyse, decide, and act. Agility matters more than it did in 2006.
Technology can accelerate work. It cannot create a culture ready to grow. A company can buy AI and still stall on decisions. It can automate processes and still keep silos. It can collect more data and still fail at accountability. It can grow quickly and discover that people, processes, and ways of working did not grow with it.
That is why growth culture matters. It is the capacity to absorb growth, adapt to it, and sustain it, not the appetite for a larger number. I write about this in Service Operations through organisational intent, structure, measurement, and continuous improvement.
The tools have changed a great deal in twenty years. Some of the organisational problems have not. As AI changes the speed of growth, the useful question is simple. Is the organisation merely equipped for growth, or is its culture ready for it?