Adaptive Enterprise

This is the book that introduced the way to create and manage adaptive organizations in 1999. It remains unique in its rigorous application of system design principles, and has been successfully implemented in organizations ranging in size from 12 people to Fortune 10 companies. Those looking for a "digital enterprise" solution should start here.

Steve Haeckel is President of Adaptive Business Designs, an executive education and coaching firm. He is past Chairman of the Marketing Science Institute, and was Director of Strategic Studies at IBM, where he named, developed and pioneered the Sense and Respond managerial principles of adaptive business design. He coined the term in 1992 and introduced it to a larger audience in a 1993 Harvard Business Review article with Richard Nolan. He made "adaptive enterprise," "sense and respond", "manage by wire," and "customer-back" part of the business vocabulary.

His book, Adaptive Enterprise:Creating and Leading Sense and Respond Organizations (Harvard Business School Press), has been reprinted multiple times in several languages, and is the basis for successful classes and workshops in individual firms and at leading business schools. Other publications have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Planning Review, Long Range Planning, Marketing Management Magazine, The IBM Systems Journal, and The Journal of Interactive Marketing. He created senseandrespond.com - a repository for additions to Sense & Respond intellectual capital.

Adaptive Enterprise: The Workbook, published in 2016, contains implementation examples, learnings and tools developed since 1999.

In 2003, he became an Advisor to the Office of Force Transformation's flagship project "Sense & Respond Logistics" in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where Sense & Respond was declared "a game-changer."

Haeckel served on the panel of judges for the McKinsey Awards, which recognize the two best articles published each year in the Harvard Business Review, and currently serves on multiple boards.  In 2012 he received the DSC Logistics Thinkers and Movers Award. He has engineering and MBA degrees from Washington University in St. Louis.