IBM has come a long way in transforming itself to a service firm. Part of its service proposition is consulting based upon the notion “Sell what we know”. Part of its upscale consulting is its Advanced Business Institute of which Stephan Haeckel is part. This book is the result of a stream of studies and projects. The book has a great start in which the need to move towards a sense and response approach of the business is put forward. The dynamics of modern business increasingly force companies to move to a customer back rather than a firm forward approach, the author explains.
The sense and respond approach is contrasted with a make and sell approach. This is not just in terms of processes (modular customization instead of mass production) and mind‐set (adaptive and responsive instead of efficient machine serving well‐defined markets with predictable needs), but also in terms of organizational priority (dynamically dispatching capabilities instead of forecasting and scheduling), governance (networked and parallel activity in stead of functional and sequential activity) and articulation of strategy (adaptive business design to respond to unpredictable change instead of strategy as a plan with defined markets and products). In that respect the approach is a great contribution to the further generation of the agile mind‐set in supply chains. In our research on creating the agile supply chain however, we have found the true challenge to be going beyond the vision. Despite the fact that the book greatly captures the agile mind‐set, that is a vision widely shared. Operationalizing the vision is a greater challenge.
That is also where the book falls short. Some of the operational elements are only in the appendix. While the core of the book maintains a high level approach in which the various elements of the sense and respond approach are further explained. Guidance to implementation however is less specific. But of course it is always good to be reconfirmed in your approach and then find that there is a remaining need for the work that you are engaged in.
