Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?

Who says elephants can’t dance? That’s the title of Louis Gerstner’s book about his turnaround of IBM, a giant of the tech world, in the 90’s. It’s also the mantra that underlies our new company. Gerstner tells the story of IBM’s competitive and cultural transformation. That’s also the mission of Agile Elephant Limited for our customers.

We just launched the Agile Elephant. It’s a new kind of consultancy designed to help companies embrace the new digital culture of social collaboration, sharing and openness that is changing business models and the world of work, but we’re different because understand business and digital inside out.  The three founders, Alan Patrick, David Terrar and Janet Parkinson, met at London’s ground-breaking Tuttle Club in 2007, and have worked together on various Social Business projects since then, including the Patchwork Elephant events at London’s Social Media Week, which led directly to the formation of Agile Elephant.

THE BUSINESS BACKDROP

Business is changing faster than ever. Every organisation’s business model is under threat from new technology, new challengers and new, more agile ways of getting the job done. We now live in a landscape of digital disruption caused by three new technology paradigms – the simultaneously rise of Cloud, Social, and Mobile technologies have the potential to change the way we do things in every part of our lives.

The changes are clear for us as consumers and in our personal lives, but what about our work lives. Much of business and the world of work is lagging behind. We believe there is enormous but unrealised potential for corporations to adopt the culture, tools and techniques that are working for the individual and the consumer.

WHY AGILE ELEPHANT?

We’ve been talking about using collaboration, knowledge sharing with social tools to help business for many years, but it’s only happening in a few companies – why isn’t everyone doing it?

That’s what we want to change. We want to help businesses transform, innovate, and be more effective, but we want more than that. As well as helping our customers, we want to create an open community of customers, partners and practitioners to spread the word. We want to promote discussion and research around what works, what doesn’t and what next.

We’ve created the Agile Elephant Manifesto to explain our approach, an annual event in London, and regular meet-ups to get together with like minded professionals, practitioners and anyone who is interested.

We’re called Agile Elephant, because there is an elephant in the room holding business back, but we know we can make the elephant dance.

WHAT MAKES US DIFFERENT

We’re not like other agencies and consulting practices. We focus on practical business needs that add real value to the bottom line. Our approach links collaboration and social tools directly to your core business process.

Our founders have been in business for decades, and they’ve been involved in the social media scene since the start. They were using social tools before Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest or Snapchat even existed. We combine decades of experience of business strategy, enterprise software, operations, sales and marketing, social media monitoring, business analytics and research.

That means that we understand both business and digital inside out and from end to end.

“making business and digital dance”