The Power of Corporate Kinetics: Create the Self-Adapting, Self-Renewing, Instant-Action Enterprise - Hardcover

The Power of Corporate Kinetics: Create the Self-Adapting, Self-Renewing, Instant-Action Enterprise, by Deloitte Consulting partners Michael Fradette and Steve Michaud, provocatively suggests that nothing short of a dynamic new workplace model will enable businesses to survive and thrive in the rapidly changing, wired world of the future. It then outlines development of just such a "kinetic" organization, proposing a series of core principles and attributes in Part 1 and offering advice and case studies to aid with actual implementation in Part 2. The goal, it maintains, is a company that can effectively turn chaos into opportunity. --Howard Rothman

Fradette and Michaud are both partners at "Big Six" consulting giant Deloitte & Touche. Here they offer their perspective on today's corporation. Their "kinetic" corporation shares many characteristics with the widely touted "virtual" corporation, and many of their remedies for dysfunctional organizations--collaboration, the encouragement of risk taking, flattened hierarchies, and rapid response--are already familiar ones. What sets the authors apart is their assertion that change is not only inevitable but also unpredictable. Based on work with the likes of Kinko's, Microsoft, and the U.S. Army, they design a corporate model that can readily respond to as well as benefit from both unpredictable market opportunities and unpredictable customer demands. Fradette and Michaud identify five separate paths that must be traveled concurrently to reach their "kinetic future": creating new leadership, building the right workforce, designing for instant action, igniting customer events, and igniting market events. David Rouse