Sustainable Growth:

Winning Organization

Adaptive Organization

Changing and Adapting to Suit Your Changing Business Environment

Vadim Kotelnikov personal logo Vadim Kotelnikov

"It is not the strongest nor most intelligent of the species that survive; it is the one most adaptable to change." ~ Charles Darwin

"Those who establish adaptable formations will survive even if they are small. While those who establish unadaptable formations shall perish – even if they are large. So it has been since the beginning of time." ~ From The Ancient Book of the Huainan Masters (a 2000 year old Chinese war text)

 

Teachings from Tao Te Chin by Lao Tzu

Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard.

Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death.

Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.

Adaptive Organization Corporate Culture

Building in Adaptiveness at Three Level

  1. Strategies

  2. Organizations

  3. Operations

Creating a Questioning Organization3

  • Instill a questioning attitude. Ensure that everyone understands the vision and goals of the enterprise, that people are empowered to achieve, and that they know they have to question every rule and assumption, every established way of doing things if they are going to initiate creative changes that the organization needs... More

Organizational Innovation and Change

Entrepreneurial Organization

Opportunity-focused Organization

Process-managed Organization

Organizations as Complex Evolving Systems

Culture for Innovation

How To Transform Your Business Into an Innovative Culture

Fast Company

Fast Idea Evaluation and Decision Making Techniques

Get Rid of Bureaucracy

Why Adaptive Organization?

In today's world characterized by rapid unpredictable change and volatility, the sustainable ability to change is much more important than the ability to create change in the first place. Companies, like any living organism, must become learning organizations that change and adapt to suit their changing business environment.

For truly adaptive firms, a rapidly changing environment becomes a strategic advantage. In a sense-and-respond organization, leaders use information technology and fundamentally new approaches to management and organization to respond better and more quickly to customers and fast-changing conditions in the marketplace and economy at large.5

Entrepreneurial Organization

Entrepreneurial organization promotes entrepreneurial activity adapting structure, management, and processes accordingly in order to gain the required agility, speed, creativity and drive to act profitably upon specific opportunities.1

There are two phases in developing an entrepreneurial workplace. Phase I creates the environment necessary to support and encourage it. Phase II is building your staff's entrepreneurial skills... More

Flat Organizational Structure

When organizations get large, they become slow, awkward, unmanageable, inflexible, and difficult to focus. They distance people from each other, and consume more energy than they release. Innovation-friendly organizations are flat and participative. They divisionalize to sustain innovation, flexibility and customer intimacy.

Division is a business unit having a clear set of customers and competitors. A division can be independently planned for within the organization and has profit and loss responsibility... More

 Case in Point  Silicon Valley Firms

"In contrast to traditional firms where organizational structure defines the framework within which work occurs, Valley firms use the work to define organization's structure."6 These structures are best described as flat, flexible, permeable, and fluid. "Reorganization is a way of life in the Silicon Valley. Organizations mimic nature's most adaptive organisms as they constantly reformulate themselves to meet the latest challenge."... More

 

References:

  1. "MegaChange", William E. Joyce

  2. "Trusted Partners", Jordan D. Lewis

  3. "Lateral Thinking Skills", Paul Sloane

  4. Lead to Succeed, Colin Turner

  5. "Whiteboard: How to Create and Lead an Adaptive Organization", Stephen H. Haeckel

  6. "Relentless Growth", Christopher Meyer