New Book: The Adaptive Organization by Patrick McGarry

The Adaptive Organization promo image

Today, I’m happy to share that The Adaptive Organization: Leading Change in the AI Era by Patrick McGarry is now available for pre-order on Amazon in both hardcover and ebook, with a paperback version soon to follow. This book is the second book in our Data & AI Leadership series that also includes my 2023 book, Leading in the Age of Data. So you’ll notice a family-feel to the cover design (both created by the talented Alli Torban).

Patrick has also developed his own website to share thoughts, announcements, and updates about this first book of his, so I recommend you check that out here.

Patrick  McGarry is a person I’ve known for many years, stretching back to when I leading the Tableau Public deployment and he was running communities at data.world. He has spent his career building open source programs, designing enterprise data systems, and advising leaders on how to modernize with clarity and speed. These days, he’s at ServiceNow, ever since they acquired data.world a year ago.

The book is built around Patrick’s CATALOG Framework, which covers seven interdependent areas: Culture & Talent, Analytics & AI, Technology & Architecture, Alignment, Leadership & Governance, Operations & Delivery, and Growth & Measurement:

Infographic showing seven pillars (Culture, Analytics, Technology, Alignment, Leadership, Operations, Growth) leading to Mission Outcomes, with a left banner 'Effective Data & AI Leadership'.

The core argument is that most organizations are thinking of lasting transformation primarily from a technology point-of-view. And there are certainly important technical questions to answer and details to work out, but meaningful change is also – and even more so – an organizational design problem.

If you’re a CDO, CAO, or any leader responsible for making data and AI actually work inside a large organization, this book was written for you. It’s honest about what’s hard, specific about what to do, and grounded in years of hands-on experience.

Douglas Laney, author of Infonomics and Data Juice, wrote the foreword and called it “a practitioner’s guide to designing organizations that can actually absorb and apply data, analytics, and AI rather than merely acquire them.” That’s a good summary of what you’ll find inside.

Pre-order your copy on Amazon today. We’re proud to publish this one.