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

by Michael Arena

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.

Genres: Leadership, Business, Nonfiction, Management

289 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 15, 2018

Reviews

[Juan Castro · Rating 1 out of 5]

Key Concepts
Five simple yet powerful actions can help you foster the flow of novel ideas in your organization:
1. Engage the edges. Encourage your team to look beyond the traditional ways of doing things to uncover
breakthrough ideas and game-changing approaches.
2. Find a friend. Empower employees to turn to their friends to share their ideas, gain validation, uncover new
perspectives, and begin the development process.
3. Follow the energy. Shift your attention from likely-to-fail projects to those that are rife with energy, and cultivate
contagious connections among people within your network to amplify big ideas.
4. Embrace the conflict. Lean into the conflicts and debates that arise. Dissension can help innovators enhance
and adapt their ideas to create a strong organizational fit and gain broad endorsement of their concepts.
5. Close the network. Set boundaries within your network to release positive energy and enable the cooperative
and combative conversations that are needed to drive momentum, spread ideas, and fuel breakthrough
solutions.

[Paul Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been an advisor for planning and implementing modest-sided organizational changes and large-scale enterprise transformations for quite some time. As the years have passed, organizational agility has increasingly become a requisite for engaging stakeholders to benefit from their ideas, guidance, and support. I find Michael Arena’s Adaptive Space to be a valuable aide in the work of change professionals and the executives they support. Personally, his work provided me with helpful archetypes – brokers, connectors, energizers, and challengers - that were new ways of thinking for me and valuable when doing change assessments and prescribing courses of action. Further, his five Adaptive Space principles plainly describe ways of directing the energy of organizations toward the place where engagement and innovation take place. Readers will benefit from Michael’s frameworks and the stories that illustrate the archetypes and principles in action.

[Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know the author and am familiar with some of his work so admittedly I'm a little biased, but this is a great book for business leaders who want to figure out how to generate more innovation. Maybe I take it for granted because I do work at an organization that applies some of these principles, but I can attest to the benefits that come from adaptive space. Quick read of just over 200 pages with lots of stories and experiences you can connect to.

[Greg Hawod · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book on how organizations can facilitate innovation and agility within. Adaptive Space provides a very compelling set of research on organizational dynamics of innovative companies who disrupts the modern way of doing things.

This book is recommended to those want to develop their organizations into more agile and innovative one.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very good read. It would be interesting to see how the concept of agile organization can enter the university context, particularly in relation to research and doctoral education.

[Kimhu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I support leaders need to create an adaptive space for idea discovery, discussion and development. We waste resources if we do not tap into the Creative genius of every employee.

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Good luck trying to actually apply anything in this book to a real corporate environment that pushes back against you constantly.

Even though this book has good intentions, it's unironically a great to way to indoctrinate college students into being excited for their post-graduation wage slave job.

[Maron · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this book in a work book club 3 years ago and I started it, but didn't get very far. I picked it back up earlier this month since it closely relates to what I am currently working on and since I have heard good things. Overall, I think it covers many relevant and inspiring topics, but I was disappointed that it was not more useful for me. Primarily I don't find the term "adaptive space" very helpful - it feels like it's just more corporate jargon to describe the various (truly various) factors that can help catalyze ideas within an organization into something quite powerful. Perhaps for others, the term "adaptive space" might be useful to describe the conditions necessary for network collaboration in an agile organization, but it didn't provide me with any new insights. I also felt that examples referenced (Netflix, 3M, Amazon, Facebook, Slack, etc) were intended to be illustrative, but since they didn't go into much depth, they fell short for me. I found more value in these examples from Season 1 and 2 of the podcast Masters of Scale. Although hearing about GM from this book was new for me and I did appreciate those examples.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr Arena makes a really strong case for the agile organization. I picked up this book because I found the synopsis intriguing. I was not disappointed in the content and conclusions. It is written conversationally rather than in lecture style, which I greatly appreciated. The examples and case studies cited were excellent illustrations of the concepts covered, and made the experience stronger. I think this book is ahead of it's time and I would recommend it as a reference for forward thinking managers and leaders.

[J Crossley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title refers not to a physical area, but instead is a culture of creativity, innovation, and connection. Today’s marketplace requires businesses to be agile and continually seek new ideas in order to survive. Michael Arena says that there are “4D Connections: of adaptive space. The first is discovery, which deals with coming up with new ideas. Development refines those new ideas. Diffusion moves the now refined ideas out to other areas of your organization so that the ideas can be further considered and refined. Disruption connections helps the idea overcome possible obstacles it may hit in the bureaucracy.

Throughout the book, the author provides examples of businesses that either utilized the process and became successful, or stayed with the status quo and floundered. One way that businesses can be agile is to try radical approaches. They may not always be successful, but by doing this on a regular basis, they are more likely to develop ideas that will become successful.