Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-And-Respond Organizations
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In today's fast-changing marketplace, a business can't expect to thrive by just making products and selling them, argues Stephan H. Haeckel in Adaptive Enterprise. "It does not matter how good you are at making widgets if the market for widgets disappears or if your competitors offer dramatically new and improved widgets faster than you can," writes Haeckel, director of strategic studies at IBM's Advanced Business Institute. Instead, for a company to succeed nowadays, says Haeckel, it needs to know how to adapt to customers--even before they themselves know what they want. Haeckel lays out a strategy to create such a "sense-and-respond" approach that will allow companies to move quickly amid change. Among the key steps: companies must use innovative ways to gather information about customer needs. For instance, car manufacturers used video cameras in airport parking lots to discover that people often struggle to lift heavy suitcases over the high lower edges of trunks. In mall parking areas, the cameras revealed that shoppers had nowhere to put soft drinks they just bought. Now, low trunk edges and cupholders are standard features in almost every car. Because "sense-and-respond" is a relatively new business model formulated by Haeckel, the book is heavy on theory and slim on concrete examples. Nevertheless, Adaptive Enterprise has some good ideas for business leaders looking for an edge in a world where rapid change is the norm. --Dan Ring
Book Description
Unpredictable, discontinuous change is an unavoidable consequence of doing business in the Information Age. Because this intense turbulence demands fast - even instantaneous - response, many large companies are fragmenting themselves into smaller, quick-response units. But in doing so, they relinquish important advantages of scale and scope. Is it possible to have it both ways? Can large, complex firms adapt successfully and systematically to unexpected change?
Yes, says Stephan Haeckel, but only if leaders learn how to manage their organizations as adaptive systems. In Adaptive Enterprise, Haeckel updates the concept of the corporation for the Information Age with a radical and comprehensive rethinking of organizational strategy, structure, and leadership. He outlines the new sense-and-respond business model that is helping companies systematically cope with the unexpected.
Haeckel argues that when unpredictability is a given, the only strategy that makes sense is a strategy to become adaptive - to sense early and respond quickly to abrupt changes in individual customer needs. As a result, a firm's operations must be driven by current customer requests - implicit as well as articulated - rather than by plans to make and sell what customers are forecasted to want in the future.
Here, for the first time, is a clear and comprehensive strategy for transforming firms into adaptive systems. Adaptive Enterprise is both a new way of thinking about business and a handbook for leadership of postindustrial organizations. It maps out, with examples and illustrations, a step-by-step plan that companies can use to transform themselves into a new type of organization - one in which change is not a problem to be solved, but rather an indispensable source of energy, growth, and value.
Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-And-Respond Organizations
Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-And-Respond Organizations,Stephan H. Haeckel,Harvard Business School Press,0875848745,Business & Economics,Business / Economics / Finance,Business/Economics,Corporate culture,Entrepreneurship,Leadership,Management,Management - General,New business enterprises,Organization Development,Organizational change,Structural Adjustment,Business strategy,Organizational theory & behaviour
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