Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-And-Respond Organizations

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