p.26 in the post-industrial "sense-and-respond" paradigm... the premise is that the function of a business in an increasingly unpredictable environment is to sense and respond effectively to abrupt changes in customer preferences.

p.27 Purpose, strategy, structure and governance are the four pillars of a managerial framework.

p.27 Those who adopt a new framework (mindset, paradigm, way of sense-making) have to confront the issue of explaining their decisions and actions to those whose sense-making remains tethered to the old paradigm.

p.28 Strategy. The need to adapt rapidly to the unpredictable change of our post-industrial economy implies a recasting of business strategy from design of action (a process design that depicts a series of activities and decisions to transform inputs into outputs) to design for action (a system design that depicts an architecture of roles and outcomes that interact to produce a customer effect). Rather than planning in advance the optimum way of linking organizational capabilities to achieve a particular objective, the sense-and-respond framework calls for strategy to be dynamically reformulated in response to what is actually happening.

p.31 Knowing earlier. Rapidly sensing and interpreting the meaning of what is happening now is the sine qua non of "anticipate and preempt" sense-and-respond strategies. Signals known to be relevant must be captured earlier and made sense of faster. New technologies and techniques for doing that, such as stream computing, event-driven processing, and sophisticated statistical, linguistic and metaphor analysis are recent examples. Signals not thought to be relevant, but that become so, are an even greater challenge met only by extending the scope of an organization's sensors and creating new diagnostic models to derive meaning from them.

p.31 Managing by wire... requires... information support of a decision maker's iterative cycle:

Sense→Interpret→Decide→Act

p.31 in post-industrial organizations, structure does not follow strategy; it is strategy. The sense-and-respond prescription for organizational design... serves as a structure for action and becomes the central strategy document of the organization.

p.32 Knowing earlier what end-users were experiencing would be of little use if Xerox was not designed to capitalize on that knowledge.

p.32 There is no time dimension in a system design. It is a structure for action, like the architectural design and specifications for a house.

p.32 Systems are intrinsically customer-oriented because their design point is always an external (customer) effect... The organization is authentically customer-oriented because it is literally designed around a customer benefit... people... are empowered to innovate and improvise how those outcomes are produced. Coherency, like alignment, is an inherent property of system designs.

p.32 As onrushing streams of rapid and unpredictable change become ever-more prevalent in our post-industrial economy, anticipate and preempt becomes the must-have managerial prescription.