| Course | MGT 726 Emerging Managerial Practices (MGT/726) |
|---|---|
| Week | 2 |
| Paper type | Doctoral analysis of organizational agility |
| Length | about 1,159 words, 4 double-spaced pages plus title page and references |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | University of Phoenix |
| Program | DBA |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for MGT 726 Week 2
Sensing, Deciding and Shifting Resources Across Three Countries: Building Organizational Agility at Cedar Valley Instruments
[Student Name]
University of Phoenix
MGT/726: Emerging Managerial Practices
Week 2 Assignment
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
Cedar Valley Instruments and all details are composites written for a model paper.
Cedar Valley Instruments, a composite measurement instrument maker based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with plants in Monterrey and Pune, built its reputation on precise, reliable instruments. When pharmaceutical and food customers began asking for connected instruments that send data to cloud software, Cedar Valley took two years to respond, and two competitors gained share. Executives now say the company must become agile. Agility is easy to praise and hard to define, and a company that pursues it without precision may simply become busier rather than faster at what matters. This paper examines organizational agility and how Cedar Valley could build it.
Dynamic Capabilities
Teece et al. (2016) linked organizational agility to dynamic capabilities, meaning a firm's ability to spot changes, act on them quickly and reshape its resources and structures. They emphasized that agility is costly, requiring slack resources and flexible structures, and that firms should pursue the level of agility their environment demands.
Strategic Agility
Doz and Kosonen (2010) traced strategic agility to three sources: strategic sensitivity, the ability to perceive and interpret change; leadership unity, the capacity of top teams to make bold collective decisions; and resource fluidity, the ability to redeploy people and capital quickly. Their framework focuses on the leadership level, complementing the broader dynamic capabilities view.
Ambidexterity
O'Reilly and Tushman (2013) reviewed studies of ambidexterity, which is running current businesses efficiently while also building new ones. They distinguished structural ambidexterity, using separate units, from contextual ambidexterity, in which individuals divide time between exploitation and exploration within a supportive context, and found that senior leadership integration is critical in both.
Assessing Sensing
Cedar Valley learned about connected instruments mainly through lost bids, a lagging signal. Its sales teams record customer requests inconsistently, and product managers meet customers rarely. Strategic sensitivity is weak, particularly about changes driven by software and data.
Assessing Decision Making
The executive team took 14 months to approve a connected-instruments program because the engineering, operations and sales leaders each defended their own priorities. Leadership unity is limited. Decisions about new technologies require consensus among functions whose incentives differ.
Assessing Resource Fluidity
Budgets are set annually by function, and engineers are assigned to product lines for years. Moving 20 engineers to software development required a reorganization that took four months to approve. Resources move slowly.
Where Cedar Valley Is Agile
Operationally, the company is responsive, which shows that agility is not a single trait of a whole organization. Plants adjust production quickly when demand shifts, and supply chain teams found alternative component sources during shortages. The gap is strategic, not operational.
Where Agility Matters Most
Agility matters most in product strategy, especially software and connected features, where customer needs and technology change rapidly. It matters less in core instrument manufacturing, where precision, validation and reliability are what customers pay for. Pushing frequent change into calibrated production could harm quality.
Why the Response Was Slow
Tracing the connected-instruments delay shows how the three capacities interact. Sales representatives heard customer requests in 2022 but had no channel to pass them on; product managers learned of the trend only after two lost bids in 2023; the executive team debated for 14 months because engineering wanted to protect hardware programs; and when funding came, engineers had to be pulled from committed projects. Each step added months. Fixing only one capacity, such as sensing, would have helped little if decisions and resources still moved slowly.
Global Dimensions of Agility
Agility across three countries adds complexity. The Pune engineering center sees Asian customer trends earlier than headquarters, but its managers report that their ideas often stall in Iowa. The Monterrey plant serves North American customers and must remain stable under nearshoring demand. Giving the Pune team a direct voice in the quarterly strategy session and a share of the opportunity reserve would use the company's global footprint as a sensing advantage rather than a coordination burden.
Agility and Employees
For employees, agility can mean opportunity or instability. Engineers moved between projects quarterly may welcome variety or feel their expertise wasted. Cedar Valley will let engineers express preferences for reassignment, protect a core of long-term roles in critical product lines and explain each shift's reasons.
Improving Sensing
Cedar Valley will create a customer sensing network: product managers will visit key accounts quarterly, sales will log requests in a shared system with monthly review and a small team will monitor technology trends and startups. Engineers in Pune, closer to fast-growing Asian markets, will contribute insights.
Improving Leadership Unity
The executive team will adopt shared goals for connected products, with bonuses tied to company results rather than functional ones. A quarterly strategy session will focus on emerging threats and opportunities, separate from operational reviews.
Improving Resource Fluidity
Quarterly portfolio reviews will allow funding and engineers to shift between projects. A reserve of 10 percent of the research and development budget will be held for opportunities that arise during the year.
Structural or Contextual Ambidexterity
Cedar Valley will create a connected-products unit with its own leader and software engineers, structurally separate from the core instruments business but sharing sales channels and customer relationships. Contextual ambidexterity, asking core engineers to split time, failed before because urgent production issues always won.
Costs and Risks of Agility
Agility requires investment in sensing, slack budgets and a new unit, roughly $6 million a year. It also risks distracting core operations and creating friction between the new unit and established teams. Senior integration through the executive team is meant to manage this friction.
Propositions for Testing
The analysis suggests propositions: quarterly resource reviews will shorten the time from identifying an opportunity to funding it; structured customer sensing will increase the share of new products based on early customer signals; and a separate connected-products unit will launch features faster than the previous integrated approach. Cedar Valley can track these over two years.
Learning From the Competitors
Two competitors that moved faster had different paths. One acquired a software startup and placed it under a separate leader reporting to the chief executive; the other built a small internal team that struggled until it was moved out of the hardware engineering organization. Both experiences support a structurally separate unit with senior sponsorship, consistent with research on ambidexterity, and suggest that a unit buried inside the existing hierarchy will move at the hierarchy's pace.
Measuring Agility
Measures include time from customer signal to funded project, time from funding to launch, share of budget reallocated each year and customer satisfaction with responsiveness. These turn agility from a slogan into something observable.
Conclusion
Cedar Valley is operationally responsive but strategically slow. Research on dynamic capabilities, strategic agility and ambidexterity points to weak sensing, limited leadership unity and rigid resources. Customer sensing, shared executive goals, quarterly reallocation and a separate connected-products unit, focused where agility matters and measured over time, can build the agility the company needs without sacrificing reliability.
References
Doz, Y. L., & Kosonen, M. (2010). Embedding strategic agility: A leadership agenda for accelerating business model renewal. Long Range Planning, 43(2-3), 370-382. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2009.07.006
O'Reilly, C. A., & Tushman, M. L. (2013). Organizational ambidexterity: Past, present, and future. Academy of Management Perspectives, 27(4), 324-338. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2013.0025
Teece, D., Peteraf, M., & Leih, S. (2016). Dynamic capabilities and organizational agility: Risk, uncertainty, and strategy in the innovation economy. California Management Review, 58(4), 13-35. https://doi.org/10.1525/cmr.2016.58.4.13
What the MGT 726 Week 2 instructions ask
The second MGT 726 assignment commonly asks doctoral students to analyze organizational agility using research and apply it to an organization. Typical requirements include defining agility and related concepts such as dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity, reviewing research on how agility is built and its costs, assessing an organization's agility, recommending practices and identifying research questions or propositions. Some prompts ask students to compare agility in different parts of an organization. Use peer-reviewed research, distinguish concepts carefully, assess the organization with evidence and cite sources in APA format. Treat agility as a capability with costs, not a universal good, and explain where stability serves the organization better than speed.
How this MGT 726 Week 2 example is built
A manufacturer that took two years to respond when customers shifted toward connected, software-enabled instruments wants to become more agile, and the paper examines what that requires. Dynamic capabilities research describes sensing, seizing and transforming. Strategic agility research highlights strategic sensitivity, leadership unity and resource fluidity. Ambidexterity research explains how firms explore and exploit at once. The assessment finds strong operational reliability but slow sensing, siloed leadership and rigid annual budgets. The paper recommends customer sensing networks, quarterly resource reallocation and a separate connected-products unit, while protecting plant stability, and proposes ways to test whether these changes improve response speed. It also estimates the cost of agility and explains how the new unit will be connected to the core.
MGT 726 Week 2 grading rubric: where the points go
Doctoral papers on agility are evaluated on conceptual clarity, use of research and the quality of organizational assessment. Strong papers distinguish dynamic capabilities, strategic agility and ambidexterity, explain how each is built and what it costs, assess the organization with specific evidence and recommend practices that fit its context. Recognizing that agility is not equally valuable everywhere, and that excessive change can harm reliable operations, shows judgment. Propositions that could be tested demonstrate doctoral thinking. A clear structure and accurate APA citations finish the paper, and faculty reward candid discussion of the trade-offs leaders must accept, such as how much slack budget the company is willing to hold idle in order to respond quickly.
MGT 726 Week 2 help: mistakes to avoid
Students often use agility as a synonym for speed or flexibility without defining it. Use research definitions. Another frequent gap is assessing the organization with general statements; cite examples, such as how long a past response took. Students also recommend agility everywhere. Explain where stability matters more. Avoid ignoring costs, such as slack resources and coordination. Connect recommendations to the specific weaknesses found. Distinguish structural and contextual approaches to ambidexterity. Finally, propose how the organization could measure whether it is becoming more agile, since claims of agility are rarely tested. Measures such as time from customer signal to funded project make progress visible.
Related MGT 726 sample papers
Other MGT 726 week samples
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- MGT 726 Week 4: Designing High-Performance Teams
- MGT 726 Week 5: Global Communication Strategies
- MGT 726 Week 6: Creativity and Adaptive Approaches
- MGT 726 Week 7: Research on Management Innovation
- MGT 726 Week 8: Integrative Scholarly Paper
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MGT 726 Week 2 questions, answered
What does MGT 726 Week 2 usually cover?
It usually covers organizational agility: definitions, dynamic capabilities, strategic agility, ambidexterity, how agility is built, its costs, an organizational assessment and recommended practices.
Where can I find a free MGT 726 Week 2 sample paper?
The complete doctoral analysis of organizational agility at a global manufacturer, with notes, is laid out above. If you share your organization, a no-cost draft can be written.
What are dynamic capabilities?
A firm's ability to spot shifts in its market, act on them with timely decisions and investments and reshape its resources and structures as the environment changes.
What is strategic agility?
The ability of a firm's leadership to perceive strategic changes early, make bold decisions together and redeploy resources quickly, often described through strategic sensitivity, leadership unity and resource fluidity.
What is the difference between structural and contextual ambidexterity?
Structural ambidexterity separates exploration and exploitation into different units, while contextual ambidexterity lets individuals divide their own time between them within a supportive context.
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