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Online market 

ecosystem

describes the customer 

behaviour or flow of 

online visitors between 

search engines, media 

sites, other intermediaries 

to an organisation and its 

competitors.

surroundings coming through the fog. He believes that having a clear  long‑  term vision, particularly where it 

isn’t based on environment analysis, isn’t practical in most industries. Instead he says that companies should 

‘keep vision fuzzy but current priorities clear’.

In a second video tutorial, ‘Strategic Agility’, Sull explains the basis for strategic agility. He explains that 

all knowledge of the future is based on uncertainty, but that managers must act now, so they need to put 

in place US Marine  Corps‑  style reconnaissance missions as an army would in order to make their battle 

plans. He gives the example of Dell, explaining how they spend relatively little on research and develop‑

ment, but are instead constantly probing the marketplace, trialling new ideas with multiple probes into the 

approach. He stresses the importance of finding anomalies in the marketplace where it doesn’t appear as 

expected and that these may represent learnings or opportunities. Detailed customer insights and busi‑

ness performance are necessary to identify these anomalies. Finally, he makes the point of the need to 

act rapidly to have scalability to ‘swarm the gap in the defences of the enemy’ where there is a strong 

opportunity.

In a digital business context, we can see that strategic agility requires these characteristics and require‑

ments for an organisation to be successful in its strategy development: