The Adaptation Advantage

10The Adaptive Organization: Creating the Capacity to Change at the Speed of Technology, Market, and Social Evolution

Key Ideas

1. The most important tool of an adaptable company is culture. Culture is the context in which a company exercises and expands its capacity to learn, grow, and identify and capture new opportunity.
2. To adeptly adapt continuously, organizational leadership must focus on inputs (culture and capacity) rather than outputs (brand, products, and services).
3. Coupling culture and capacity is key to becoming a scalable learning organization and gaining the adaptation advantage.

What Should We Measure?

When William Muir set out to study productivity, he used hens as his test subject because measuring their egg-laying productivity was simple. She who lays the most eggs is the most productive. (If you skipped Chapter 9, you'll want to go back and give it a quick scan to learn more about this intriguing experiment.) For much of the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions, we measured human productivity in the same way. Count the number of acres plowed, the cars produced on the line, the barrels of crude pulled from the earth, the new accounts opened, or the clicks and page views on a website, and you get a measure of productivity.

But what if, in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we are measuring the wrong things? Does optimizing the production of Product A matter as much when market winds shift to Technology B before you can even complete an inventory of the ...