Adaptive Space: How GM and Other Companies are Positively Disrupting Themselves and Transforming into Agile Organizations

Book excerpt: Lack of Agility is the kiss of death. Position your company to succeed in world of change.To edge out the competition in today’s disruptive environment, you need to ensure that your company is agile—that it can respond to change instantly and effectively. Because fast and furious change is the only thing you can count on in business today.Network expert Michael Arena helped enable GM’s legendary turnaround. In these pages, he explains how you can transform your own company through the concept of adaptive space. Based on hundreds of interviews and the author’s own groundbreaking study of dozens of organizations spanning a variety of industries, Adaptive Space shows how to position your company for today—and for the future—by enabling creativity, innovation, and novel ideas to flow freely among teams, across departments, and throughout the company. Using GM as the main case study—along with the stories of other highly adaptive organizations, like Apple, Amazon, Disney, and Gore—Arena provides a model you can follow to reinvent your company. It’s about inspiring employees to explore new ideas, empowering the most creative people and teams to spread their ideas across the organization, and operationalizing the entrepreneurial spirit so adaptability is set in stone. Hesitation is a killer in today’s business landscape. With Adaptive Space, you have everything you need to confront disruption with smart, confident actions and seize the valuable opportunities that come with change.