
“ The Age of Surge is transformational innovation in a bottle for leaders and companies seeking to win in the tech-fueled digital economy! ”
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The Age of Surge
Our upcoming book reveals a new human-centered approach to scaling agility and transforming companies for digital.
A science backed framework for more rapidly scaling speed, agility, and digital innovation across the entire organization.

Praise for the Age of Surge

The global forces of digital are putting traditional companies at risk of irrelevance. In their place is an emerging, more complex organizational species, one built to thrive amidst volatility and uncertainty. These new digital native companies embrace complexity and ambiguity. What traditional companies see as impending disaster, digital native companies see as opportunities—and as a result, they are growing exponentially. In order to compete in this new world, traditional companies must transform their organizations, but this transformation is not just technical. In fact, the transformation that matters most now is human, cultural, and structural.
Surge offers a provocative alternative to those espousing shiny new tools, technology and cut-and-paste formulas borrowed from the digital elite. Built on the science surrounding the influence of social systems, neuroscience, and complexity, Surge provides a pragmatic framework for exploiting these social forces for rapid, profound, and continuous digital innovation and Enterprise transformation.
Section 1
Chapter 1
Start Where You Are
Your organization isn’t broken—now is the time to disrupt it. Start where you are is the fundamental principle of your journey. Push your company to the edge of chaos. Find your new equilibrium.
Chapter 2
The Digital Wave Journey
VUCA—Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity—is the paradigm for every digital wave journey. On this journey, your company will embark on a process of transformation that moves through waypoints of digital disruption. Built on experimentation, testing, and learning, the journey will alter both the human and technical spheres of your organization.
Chapter 3
Coordination Without Bureaucracy
The Industrial Age principles of linearity and hierarchy no longer work. Only when organizations are viewed as complex ecosystems, rather than complicated machines, can they become living networks built for digital transformation.
Chapter 4
Navigating the Digital Tsunami
The journey to your digital transformation will be unique—there are no standard pathways. But navigating this transformation will take you through some critical gateways: creating a vision, building senior leadership commitment, and engaging middle managers. The destination: a living organization, capable of continuous adaptation, that unleashes the passions of those who work in it.
Section 2
Chapter 5
Social Memes—Activate the Collective
Storytelling—and the language we use to tell stories—build human communities, including companies. Purposeful storytelling and adaptive language, circulated through social memes, stitch together the world of the company and breathe life into its transformation.
Chapter 6
Helix Cycles—Operationalize Continuous Transformation
True digital transformation requires rethinking every aspect of the organization while developing not just individual products but seamless customer experiences. How? Helix cycles provide a framework that works both on the company and in the market, simultaneously shaping and reshaping both the organization and the customer experience.
Chapter 7
The Strive Framework—Advance Breakthrough Performance
Digital-native companies use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to mobilize organizational alignment without limiting agility. Strive builds on the original OKR framework to create a powerful organizational performance system that supercharges your digital transformation and creates a resilient, adaptive organizational ecosystem.
Chapter 8
Intentional Networks—Engage the Middle
In a Wave 3 company, middle managers—traditionally vilified as obstacles to information flow—are a vital component of the critical middle network, which connects people across boundaries to break down silos and reinvigorate collaboration. Building intentional networks of middle managers powers horizontal alignment by connecting the people in your company who know how to get work done.
Chapter 9
Leading Digital—Chart Your Course
Leaders can either hinder or energize a company’s digital transformation; the leader’s transformation is a cornerstone of the larger corporate transformation. Leading digital means championing the digital transformation, providing the supports needed to embed self-management, self-governance, and self-organization in the organization and creating environments that invite inclusion, encourage diversity, and nurture innovation.