The Adaptive Organization: A Critical Thinking Framework and Toolset for Problem-Solving and Decision-Making

Summary

In The Adaptive Organization, Dr. John Kotter, New York Times bestselling author of twenty-three books and Harvard Business School professor emeritus, joins his Kotter International colleagues to present a framework for building organizations that thrive amid AI disruption, geopolitical volatility, and cyber threats. The authors argue that incremental fixes to legacy operating models are no longer sufficient.

The Adaptive Organization introduces three interlocking shifts required for true organizational adaptability: management practices redesigned to invite rather than stifle change, cultures that inspire leadership from many rather than the few, and broadly distributed change capabilities across the entire workforce. Real-world case studies from NBC Universal, NASA, FedEx, and Netflix ground the framework in proven practice. Listeners will also find:

• A framework built on five decades of research and two decades of hands-on consulting with Global 5000 companies
• Strategies for redesigning management practices so they accelerate organizational change rather than obstruct or slow it down
• Approaches to building organizational cultures where leadership capability is distributed broadly rather than concentrated among the few at the top
• Insights drawn from transformations at organizations including Microsoft, Uber, and 3M across more than twenty countries