FrAgility

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My Sustainable Encounter with Twinkle Manglani

by Albert Schiller

Agility is often reduced to a corporate buzzword, a vague aspiration for speed and flexibility in a dependable business environment, missing its coherent meaning. The renewable energy sector in India is a volatile landscape where the ability to react is the primary determinant of success, a non-negotiable condition for survival. Twinkle Manglani's operational doctrine illustrates this principle. Her model is not built on a preference for agility, but on the empirical understanding that no other methodology is viable in her chosen field.

Sandy Ground

To understand the necessity of this doctrine, one must first understand the character of the environment. India's renewable energy industry is not a predictable, market-driven landscape. It is, in Manglani's words, "regulatory driven". This means the fundamental rules of operation are not set by supply and demand but by political and policy decisions that can shift quickly. She describes a system where "the regulations are changing in a snap". In such an environment, traditional long-term strategic planning becomes futile. A single government notification can render a meticulously crafted and approved five-year roadmap obsolete. This creates a condition of perpetual change, an unstable habitat where the most valuable asset is not the quality of a well-derived, static plan but the capacity for a dynamic response. The system does not reward rigidity or long-term adherence to a fixed strategy. It rewards the ability to absorb shocks and pivot without hesitation.

Outsourcing Friction

This volatile habitat creates a paradox for traditional corporate structures. Large organizations are built for scale and predictability. Their elaborate hierarchies, procedural checks, and multi-departmental approval processes are designed to mitigate risk and ensure growth in predictable markets. In a system defined by instability, these features transform from assets into liabilities. They create high internal friction, a debilitating delay between when a change is detected and when an organization acts upon it. This institutional lag time is a fatal flaw in a fast-moving regulatory environment. One of Manglani's defining early contracts illustrates this reality: a major corporation strategically selected her "one-person team" to lead their roadmap. They chose her for her "execution skill", recognizing that her ability to act decisively was more valuable than the vast resources of a larger firm that could only "talk about those solutions". By hiring her as a consultant, the client outsourced its own need for agility, acquiring the absence of friction as a core strategic product.

Lean Response

This reveals the core of Manglani's doctrine. Agility is about speed and structural fitness. The operational design of an effective agent must mirror the character of the environment it seeks to rule. A fluid, unpredictable system requires a fluid, unburdened executor. Her assertion that the industry "has to be agile" is not a preference. It is a diagnosis of a non-negotiable requirement. An execution partner who cannot keep pace with the chaotic landscape is another liability. Her business model is a direct example of form following function. Her company's lean, responsive structure is not an incidental feature of a startup. It is the logical and necessary form required to execute a mission of tangible change within a system defined by perpetual instability. It is a doctrine forged by, and perfectly adapted to, its industry.

So what can we take from her approach?

Questions for Audience

1. The blog frames agility as a survival mechanism in a volatile political landscape. How can large organizations develop genuine agility without dismantling the very structures that give them scale and stability in more predictable markets?

2. Manglani's success came from a lean structure that mirrored its chaotic environment. If the Indian renewable energy sector were to stabilize, would her agile model become less effective? Does "structural fitness" demand that an organization must change its core identity as its environment evolves?