The Book Chapters

Danielle Duell 

The purpose-led enterprise is a fundamental evolution in organizational value creation. It moves beyond the traditional profit-centric model to one where purpose serves as the primary filter for all decision-making and operations. The purpose-led enterprise enables organizations to address complex systemic challenges while maintaining sustainable business performance. This is demonstrated through Tesla's comprehensive approach to sustainable energy and OzHarvest's focus on nourishing communities. Unlike previous models that treated purpose as an add-on to business strategy, the purpose-led enterprise re-imagines the entire organizational system – transforming how value is created, decisions are made, and success is measured. This enables enterprises to tackle previously intractable challenges while fostering sustainable growth and meaningful impact. Three implementation pathways include developing clear design principles to craft an authentic, actionable purpose statement that serves as their north star, structured frameworks to embed purpose into decision-making processes, and integrated measurement systems that balance both financial and purpose-related metrics.  

Michael Rosemann 

Ambitious leaders such as William Kettering, General Motors, and Albert Bourla, Pfizer, seperates 100 years, but they are united in unlocking the transformative power of ambition within their enterprise. Going beyond common expectations, requires an ambition with five features: simple narrative, stretch target, realistic objective, measureable outcome and energised workforce. The notion of an opportunity appetite statement is introduced to allow assessing an organization’s collective commitment to a new ambition. The ambitious enterprise is of course very much alive in ambition-native organizations such as NASA who pioneered balancing risks and opportunies. A sense of ambition is also the trigger for organizations in established sectors such as banks, mining or utilities where it shifts the organizational energy towards demanding target goals. This ensures that growing technical capabilities are used for equally growing organizational objectives. 

 Marek Kowalkiewicz, Sha Huang  

Curiosity is a critical capability for organizations seeking sustainable competitive advantage. We introduce the curious enterprise that identifies and integrates five distinct types of curiosity—innate, design, analytical, retrospective, and generative. This transforms curiosity from an individual trait into a collective, strategically aligned, and ethically guided organizational capability. Such a curiosity-driven transformation is particularly crucial as organizations navigate an AI-driven future, where the ability to blend human and machine curiosity will become a key differentiator for competitive advantage. To implement the curious enterprise framework, organizations should establish roles and structures that support different types of curiosity, such as introducing a Chief Curiosity Officer and creating cross-functional teams that combine human expertise with technological capabilities. Organizations also need to develop measurement systems that track curiosity-related metrics while ensuring that curiosity initiatives remain aligned with strategic objectives through a balance of creative exploration and business focus. 

 Max Zadmehr, Robert Perrons, Kevin Desouza 

 The dynamic enterprise is a business model built on continuous adaptation and evolution. Unlike traditional firms that react to change, dynamic enterprises proactively sense, seize, and transform in anticipation of emerging disruptions. Such a dynamic capability is critical in today’s volatile business landscape, where sustainable competitive advantage is increasingly transient. Going forward, the importance of dynamic enterprises will further intensify due to rapid technological advancements, shifting regulatory landscapes, and evolving consumer expectations. This will require focus on overcoming and even competing on change latency - ensuring that organizations detect, decide, allocate resources, and implement change faster than competitors. Implementing a dynamic enterprise, requires enhanced sensing capabilities by integrating AI-driven analytics, fostering a culture of curiosity, and leveraging cross-functional insights; improved seizing capabilities through agile decision-making, rapid resource reallocation, and risk-balanced investments in innovation, and strengthen transformation capabilities by embedding continuous reinvention and an ongoing strategic process.  

  David Herold, Maria Kaya 

 Exaptation in enterprises is the re-purposing of existing resources, technologies, or capabilities for new and innovative applications. Unlike incremental innovation, which builds on existing processes, exaptation enables a fundamental shift in how assets are utilized, allowing businesses to adapt rapidly to changing environments. What is novel about exaptation is its systematic approach to leveraging existing resources in unexpected ways, offering a cost-effective and sustainable pathway for innovation. Key implementation suggestions include: (1) auditing existing resources to uncover hidden potential across technologies and processes, (2) encouraging a creative and collaborative culture to foster cross-disciplinary insights and problem-solving, and (3) implementing structured experimentation and feedback loops through incubation projects to test new applications before scaling. 

   Vibhor Pandey, Kevin Desouza 

  The decisive enterprise is as a strategic imperative for firms seeking sustained competitive advantage. Integrating strategic foresight, complexity theory, and game theory enables organizations to transcend reactive decision-making and cultivate adaptive intelligence. By embedding predictive analytics, real-time scenario analysis, and ecosystem sensing, decisive enterprises navigate uncertainty with proactive, pre-emptive, and opportunity-driven strategies. Comparative case studies such as IndiGo Airlines, Tesla, Atlassian, Airbnb, and Shopify contrast firms that leverage emergent affordances and market foresight with those that succumb to decision biases and strategic inertia. We examine the interplay between market responsiveness, speed to innovation, and crisis adaptation, incorporating the Black Swan, White Swan, and Grey Swan phenomena to illustrate resilience in high-uncertainty environments. The chapter explores platform business models and the OODA loop framework, highlighting how digital ecosystems and anticipatory governance enable firms to re-shape industry trajectories rather than react to them. 

    Yancong Xie, Kevin Desouza 

   In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) business environment, enterprises must evolve beyond traditional resilience frameworks to embrace robustness. Robustness is a critical attribute that enables organizations to maintain operations and adapt dynamically to disruptions. Unlike resilience, which focuses on recovery post-crisis, robustness ensures continuity amid crises by leveraging instrumental, structural, and cognitive robustness. Robust enterprises prioritize three key implementation strategies: (1) structural flexibility – diversifying supply chains, decentralizing operations, and fostering adaptive networks to mitigate risks; (2) cognitive agility – enhancing real-time data processing and decision-making capabilities to anticipate and respond to emerging threats; and (3) strategic redundancy – building adaptable infrastructures that ensure operational continuity despite disruptions. By embedding robustness into their core frameworks, organizations can thrive in unpredictable environments, transforming crises into opportunities for growth and innovation. 

    Anne Marie Halton, Anna Wiewiora 

  Paradoxes are contradictory yet interrelated tensions that exist simultaneously and persist over time. Enterprises grapple with maximising efficiency and pursuing innovation; meeting short term demands and investing in future aspirations; balancing global and local impact; investing in sustainability and increasing profit. Rather than adopting traditional binary thinking to resolve the paradox by choosing either/or option, future enterprises embrace “both/and” mindset to harness paradoxes as sources of strategic advantage. LEGO, Interface, and Toyota, have successfully navigated paradoxes by embedding the “both/and” mindset into their culture, processes, and leadership. Leaders play a crucial role and are catalysts for the enterprise-wide mindset shift. This chapter explains how paradox can be turned into a strategic asset. It introduces actionable strategies for identifying, diagnosing, and navigating paradoxes in real-world business contexts with a “both/and” mindset.  

 Tyge Kummer 

 The rise of AI systems has enabled new possibilities to support human decision-makers. The balanced enterprise effectively manages hybrid decision-making in human-machine collaborations. This chapter outlines the related benefits and challenges, explaining why human expertise and intervention will remain critical in the foreseeable future. An adapted task-technology fit model is used to visualise the influence of task characteristics, technology attributes, and individual traits, using scenarios with different human-AI configurations. Each scenario results in a unique fit constellation to manage these collaborations and achieve balance. A balanced human-AI scorecard is proposed to ensure regulatory compliance, transparency, and continuous improvement. Structured frameworks are needed to optimise human-AI interactions, ensuring AI serves as a supportive tool while preserving the value of human expertise. Maintaining a balance between automation and human skills avoids overreliance on technology and enhances decision-making processes and outcomes. 

 Paula Dootson, Ralf Plattfaut, Manfred Baer  

Explainability is a critical attribute for future enterprises as they need to effectively explain their decisions to various stakeholders. While business decisions have historically required a low level of explanation, the increasing complexity of modern operations, coupled with the emergence of automated decision-making and artificial intelligence, has made explainability both more challenging and crucial. There are three key dimensions of explainability: reasoning (how and why decisions are made), perspective (internal versus external stakeholders), and expertise (explanations tailored for experts versus non-experts). This framework becomes significant as regulations like the EU AI Act mandate greater transparency in automated decision-making processes. To implement effective explainability, organizations should: first, systematically identify which decisions require explanation and to whom; second, ensure their decision-making processes are designed with explainability in mind, potentially sacrificing some automation for transparency; and third, establish dedicated organizational capabilities, particularly within corporate communications, to translate complex technical decisions into appropriate explanations for different stakeholder groups. 

 Artemis Chang, Alireza Nili, Wasana Bandara   

The responsible enterprise is essential as businesses face new challenges brought about by rapid technological advancements. As digital technologies, particularly AI, continue to re-shape industries, organizations must re-think their role and impact. Enterprises can ensure the responsibility of their actions, align with their core principles and values, while navigating complex environments. Drawing on real-world examples, such as TikTok's algorithm and Google's AI governance model, we illustrate the evolving responsibilities enterprises face as they integrate new technologies into their operations. We introduce anapproach to managing AI responsibly and propose actionable principles for enterprises to adopt as they strive to operate in ways that align with the challenges and opportunities presented by digital technology.  

 Shannon Colville, Nadine Ostern, Michael Rosemann    

Trust is central to business relationships, influencing how customers choose brands, remain loyal, and advocate for them. Yet, many enterprises struggle to define, measure, and manage trust in ways that drive sustained success, often treating it as an abstract concept rather than a tangible asset. However, trust is a strategic asset that organizations can actively build, track, and embed across customer interactions, decision-making, and governance. Trust is no longer just about reputation. Rather it must be cultivated by reducing uncertainty, minimising vulnerability, reinforcing credibility, and demonstrating benevolence across business operations and decision-making. When designed with purpose, trust shifts from being an unpredictable risk to a powerful source of differentiation. Trust Experience (TX) Design is a structured framework that enables organizations to 1) identify trust gaps and opportunities, 2) develop trust-building strategies that reduce uncertainty and reinforce credibility, and 3) measure trust impact through meaningful metrics beyond traditional satisfaction scores. By embedding trust into business strategy, organizations can strengthen customer relationships, improve retention, and gain a competitive advantage in an economy where trust is an increasingly critical driver of success. 

 Maria Kaya, Rudolf Messner     

The age of climate change demands equally transformative change in enterprises towards greater sustainability. Porter’s notion of Shared Value had gained currency by recognising that regenerativity must be inherent to all processes of value creation. Transformation of value creation requires thinking of the enterprise as a system that is interconnected and interacting with social and environmental opportunities and challenges. To create and manage complex changes, system thinking offers a compelling framework for supporting business strategies and driving regenerativity leadership. The case example of Patagonia highlights how a regenerative strategy encompass multiple dimensions and can be the foundation for sustainable competitive advantage.