Patrick McGarry’s The Adaptive Organization: Leading Change in the AI Era is published today and ready to order in hardcover, paperback, and ebook.

Today we’re proud to publish The Adaptive Organization: Leading Change in the AI Era, the debut book from Patrick McGarry, Federal Chief Data Officer at ServiceNow. It is a practical guide for the executives carrying the weight of this moment: the CDOs, CDAOs, CAOs, and CIOs who are expected to make data and AI deliver real results.

Here is the problem the book takes on: almost every leader these days claims to be data-driven, yet most organizations are still struggling to turn that ambition into operational reality. The gap between strategy and execution has never been wider, or more consequential. Patrick’s argument is that this gap is not just a technology problem. It is also – and primarily – an organizational one. You can’t close this gap by buying fancier tools. You close it by designing an organization that can actually absorb and apply data, analytics, and AI over time.

The CATALOG Framework

The book is built around the CATALOG Framework, a model spanning seven interdependent domains that leaders have to manage together rather than as separate workstreams:

One of Patrick’s central ideas runs through all seven: governance is infrastructure, not overhead. Treating it as a cost center is how transformation stalls. Treating it as the foundation is how organizations build the capacity to keep pace with what comes next.

From the Foreword

In his foreword, Douglas B. Laney, author of Infonomics and Data Juice, puts it plainly:

“Patrick McGarry has produced a book that respects the reader’s intelligence and the difficulty of the work. He doesn’t promise transformation through technology acquisition, nor does he reduce leadership to platitudes. However, for anyone who suspects that the gap between data ambition and data reality is at its core an organizational design problem, this is the book that shows you how to close it.”

— Douglas B. Laney, Data, Analytics and AI Strategist, and author of Infonomics and Data Juice

What Leaders Are Saying

“Patrick McGarry’s book arrives just as enterprises are struggling to incorporate AI and deliver transformative benefits. His CATALOG framework treats governance, culture, and leadership as engineering disciplines, not afterthoughts. The argument that governance is infrastructure, not overhead, is one the industry needs to internalize. This is a practitioner’s book written by someone who has done the work, not just theorized about it.”

–Sanjeev Mohan, Principal Analyst, SanjMo, and former Gartner VP of Research

“Patrick McGarry has written the leadership book that the AI era demands. Patrick has sat in the room where modernization plans become architecture realities and it shows on every page. I’ve seen first hand and can attest to the importance of the points he makes on data architecture as the enterprise’s nervous system, and that the real design question isn’t which platform does everything but how you make many platforms work together. It is something I wish every executive adopting AI understood today.”

— Barr Moses, Co-Founder and CEO, Monte Carlo

“The limitation of most books on data and AI transformation is that they stop at the strategy layer. They tell you what needs to change but they leave you alone at the implementation cliff without a tactical roadmap. Patrick McGarry closes that gap with unusual honesty, depth, and experience. If your ambition for AI keeps outrunning your organization’s ability to actually deliver it, this is the book you’ve been waiting for.”

— Matt Laessig, Co-Founder and COO, data.world

“In intelligence work we have a term for an organization that confuses data possession with analytic rigor: vulnerable. Patrick McGarry’s framework addresses exactly that vulnerability, not with another technology layer, but with the organizational architecture that makes data trustworthy enough to act on. That is infrastructure thinking and it is long overdue.”

— Ellen McCarthy, former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research; Founder and CEO, Trust in Media Cooperative

“The gap between ambition and reality is not a technology problem, it’s an organizational one. The organizations that succeed are not the ones that buy the most tools, but the ones that design themselves to actually absorb and apply data, analytics, and AI in a way that compounds over time. If you are serious about building an organization that can thrive in the AI era, not just experiment with it, this is a must-read.”

— Brett Hurt, Co-founder and former CEO of data.world, Bazaarvoice, and Coremetrics; author of Love Conquers Fear

“The Adaptive Organization is a true AI playbook that should be on every CDAO’s desk to successfully navigate the challenges of AI. The book explains the importance of data governance and provides a framework for CDAOs to use as they support AI initiatives across their organizations.”

— Joe Hilger, COO, Enterprise Knowledge, LLC

Order Your Copy

The Adaptive Organization is available now in hardcover, paperback, and ebook.

• Hardcover and paperback: Order on Amazon
• Ebook: Order on Kindle
• More on the book at mcgarrycdo.com

If your AI ambition keeps outrunning your ability to deliver on it, this is the book to start with.