Stephan H. 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 (ABI) Steve named, created, 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, 1999 ), provides organizational leaders with a comprehensive framework for adaptiveness, introducing important new principles for business strategy, structure and governance. The book, now in its third printing, has been translated into several languages, and is the basis for successful classes and workshops for individual firms and at leading business schools. Individual chapters are available on line. Other publications have appeared in several books, and as articles 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. An advisor to senior executives at 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.
He is a frequent speaker to executive audiences in the United States and abroad. Business strategy, marketing, knowledge management, information, and human resources executives have been particularly interested in understanding the implications of adaptive, customer-back business designs for their disciplines.
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. From 1985 to 1986 he served on the Advisory Council of the Federal National Mortgage Association. In 1994, he was named to the panel of judges for the McKinsey Awards, which recognize the two best articles published each year in the Harvard Business Review. He has engineering and MBA degrees from Washington University in St. Louis
