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blindsided by Apple coming out of 'left field' and redefining the
'smartphone' from a business tool to a consumer must-have art form
and a platform to reshape the world. It is easy to pay lip service to the

idea of monitoring the context; but, we 'see' that which we are
conditioned to see. So IBM engineers 'saw' the emergence of the
graphical user interface, but they discounted it as less 'serious' than

DOS.

Effect on Business Culture
The need to monitor and the need to adapt, form the axes of, perhaps,

the most recognized classification of business culture: Quinn's
Competing Values Framework. Using a classic two-by-two matrix
Quinn et al defined four broad business cultures. A brilliant

framework, Quinn recognized that every firm of any size will contain
within it a mix of employees with different cultural preferences, but
that a firm overall will tend to one of the categories. The tool can be
used to raise awareness of the strategic implications of culture

Building Adaptation into the Business System

Task level

The latest trend to 'Agility' is the current attempt to build a capacity to
adapt into the task level of a system. Agility is rooted in the software
creation process and resolves the problem of endless opportunities to
enhance functionality by creating versions and 'freezing' development

to get an offering out to market.

It is noticeable that agility thinking has caught on at the task level, but
very few organizations have carried the construct through to the
corporate/system level.

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