Corporate Plasticity: How to Change, Adapt, and Excel

What do The Beatles, Apollo 13, the Roman military, a pack of wolves, and the very best companies in the world all have in common? Answer: Plasticity. They can change, adapt, and excel as the situation requires.

In most organizations, strategy and functional excellence get the most attention. But even the best of either provides only limited long-term advantage. Highly effective organizations add Plasticity as a third dimension and rack up stellar breakthroughs—again and again. It is the key ingredient that allows strategy and functional excellence to deliver value.

As the authors show in Corporate Plasticity: How to Change, Adapt, and Excel, Plasticity also enables great organizations to break down barriers and collaborate in the pursuit of a common objective, and to reconfigure or rewire themselves to face down challenges or reach ever-stronger competitive positions.

Through entertaining stories and astute analysis, this book demonstrates that Plasticity spurs sports teams to become champions, companies to book record earnings, and artists to attain worldwide fame. You can use its principles—adaptability, flexibility, fluid networks and roles, lofty goals, and innovation, among others—to achieve operational excellence, tear down silos, and create more vibrant, creative enterprises. Your organization can become not just highly profitable and fun to work for, but an organization that can change the world.

Plasticity allows an organization to choose its own destiny, become versatile, and dare more than others. Its success lies in a set of abilities called the Magic 7:

• Purpose: Your company must discover, select, and express what it is meant for.
• Focus: Your company must have the courage to ignore everything that is not in line with its purpose, and then see that purpose through.
• Culture: Your company must create the conditions that allow people to work across boundaries and outside of predefined roles.
• Spirit: Your company must inspire people to feel part of a cause that is bigger than they are.
• Networking: Your company must provide the means, freedom, and encouragement for people to nurture and grow their internal and external networks continuously.
• Knowledge: Your company must encourage experts to provide their knowledge and make it readily available to everyone who needs it.
• Leadership: Your company's leaders must model and personify the characteristics they want others to adopt.

Silo thinking? Poor collaboration? Weak earnings? Strategies that gain no traction? Corporate Plasticity: How to Change, Adapt, and Excel is the answer. It shows you how to cultivate each of the seven disciplines to infuse Plasticity in an organization. That—along with razor-sharp strategy and crisp execution—will unleash the power you need to reach both personal and corporate goals. You might even change the world.

What you’ll learn

• What Plasticity is and what it can do for your organization
• What abilities are needed to create Plasticity
• How to foster Plasticity to reach the grandest goals you can imagine
• How Plasticity can eliminate wasteful efforts, groupthink, and a reliance on cash cows for revenue and profit
• How Plasticity powers up innovative thinking and products
• How to use Plasticity to respond faster and better to market signals

About the Authors

Christian Schuh is the leader of A.T. Kearney's Supply Management Practice in EMEA and is based in Vienna, Austria. He joined A.T. Kearney 17 years ago and has since then led multiple projects for clients in the automotive, construction equipment, defense, high tech, packaging, and steel industry in Austria, China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, Ukraine, and the USA. His areas of expertise include strategic sourcing, high-end R&D, and organization. He is the author of various books (most notably The Purchasing Chessboard), monographs, and articles. Before he joined A.T. Kearney, he worked several years for Unilever. Schuh studied aeronautical engineering at TU Graz (Austria) and holds a doctorate in business administration. He lives in the historic city center of Vienna.

Alenka Triplat is a member of A.T. Kearney's Operations Practice. In ten years with the firm in Vienna, Austria, she has led multiple projects on supply management topics across various industries, such as discrete manufacturing (consumer electronics, food consumer products, and heavy equipment), process industries (steel, gas, cables, packaging), and financial institutions (commercial banks and insurances). She has worked with international clients based in most European countries and spent longer periods of time working and living in the USA, China, and Taiwan. She is an expert in wide range of supply management topics (sourcing strategies using the Purchasing Chessboard, negotiation techniques, procurement transformation) as well as cross-functional collaboration and manufacturing excellence. She also published multiple articles on these topics. Alenka Triplat studied economics at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and business administration at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (Austria). She currently shuttles between Shanghai, Vienna, and Ljubljana.

Wayne Brown is a principal in A.T. Kearney's Strategic Operation Practice. He has over 20 years' industry and consulting experience and his key areas of expertise include service operations, lean improvement, and transformation. Before joining A.T. Kearney, Wayne held roles at Royal Sun Alliance Insurance and Halifax Bank. He has first class bachelors and master's degrees in business and is a chartered marketer. Wayne is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Wayne lives with his family in Yorkshire, U.K., and works out of A.T. Kearney's London office.

Wim Plaizier is a partner in A.T. Kearney's operations practice and its energy and process industries practice. Wim has close to 30 years of experience in consulting and industry. His key areas of expertise encompass operational excellence in asset intensive industries, end-to-end value chain management, and post-merger integration. He has been A.T. Kearney's lead partner for the Benelux and for the Africa region and was the global lead for the operations practice. He is currently member of A.T. Kearney's global leadership team. Before joining A.T. Kearney, Wim worked with Shell in various roles in procurement and engineering. He earned an MBA from Henley Management College in the UK. Wim works out of both A.T. Kearney's Amsterdam and Johannesburg offices.

Laurent Chevreux is a partner in A.T. Kearney's Operations Practice. Laurent has more than 20 years of industry and consulting experience. His key areas of expertise encompass supply chain, value chain reconfiguration, and retail. As a former supply chain executive for a manufacturer and a distributor, and as a consultant, he has overseen distribution and operational turnaround in various sectors and has become passionate about the topic of product availability in both brick-and-mortar and online retail. He holds a degree in manufacturing engineering from the venerable Ecole Nationale Suprieure de Techniques Avances in Paris and a master's degree from the University of California Santa Barbara. Laurent is based in A.T. Kearney's Paris, France office.