Stephan H. Haeckel

Steve Haeckel is President of Adaptive Business Designs, an executive education and coaching firm. He is past Chairman of the Marketing Science Institute, and was corporate futurist, Director of Advanced Market Development and Director of Strategic Studies at IBM.

At IBM’s Advanced Business Institute Steve named, developed and pioneered the Sense and Respond managerial principles of adaptive business design. He coined the term in a 1992 article, and introduced it to a larger audience in a 1993 Harvard Business Review article with Richard Nolan . Through his courses, articles, speaking engagements and coaching activities he made “adaptive enterprise,” “sense and respond”, “manage by wire,” and “customer-back” part of the business vocabulary. His book, Adaptive Enterprise:Creating and Leading Sense and Respond Organizations (Harvard Business School Press), provides organizational leaders with a comprehensive framework for adaptiveness, introducing post-industrial principles for business strategy, structure and governance. The book has been reprinted multiple times in several languages, and is the basis for successful classes and workshops in individual firms and at leading business schools. Other publications have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Planning Review, Long Range Planning, Marketing Management Magazine, The IBM Systems Journal, and The Journal of Interactive Marketing. He created www.senseandrespond.com – a repository for additions to Sense & Respond intellectual capital developed since the publication of Adaptive Enterprise. Adaptive Enterprise: The Workbook, published in 2016, contains implementation examples, learnings and tools developed by implementers since 1999.

An educator of senior executives in a wide variety of private sector, not-for-profit, education and public sector organizations, Haeckel is an international authority on customer-value growth strategies. In 2003, he became an Advisor to the Office of Force Transformation’s flagship project “Sense & Respond Logistics” in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where Sense & Respond was declared “a game-changer.”

Haeckel’s IBM career included responsibilities as a marketing executive in Europe and on IBM’s corporate staff, where he headed the project that resulted in IBM’s decision to enter the commercial systems integration business. He was a coauthor of IBM’s successful services strategy.

He served on the panel of judges for the McKinsey Awards, which recognize the two best articles published each year in the Harvard Business Review, and currently serves on multiple boards. In 2012 he received the DSC Logistics Thinkers and Movers Award.

Haeckel has engineering and MBA degrees from Washington University in St. Louis.

SHH Bibliography