The Adaptive Organization

Build an organization engineered for disruption, not just resistant to it

In The Adaptive Organization: How to Succeed in an Era of Constant Change, Dr. John Kotter, New York Times bestselling author of 23 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.

Readers 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
• Methods for embedding change capabilities across the entire workforce to create organizations that anticipate and respond to ongoing disruption
• Insights drawn from transformations at organizations including Microsoft, Uber, and 3M across more than 20 countries

Designed for senior executives, change leaders, and organizational strategists facing relentless disruption, The Adaptive Organization provides a research-grounded playbook for redesigning management practices, distributing leadership, and embedding change capabilities at every level of the enterprise.