Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World

Kotter's argument is that large organisations cannot both run reliable operations at scale and respond to rapid external change using a single hierarchical structure — the fix is a "dual operating system" of hierarchy alongside a volunteer network. The book extends his earlier work on change management into a structural argument about organisational design. For product direction the dual-system idea is a useful diagnostic: much of the friction between product teams and the rest of a large organisation is the mismatch between the two operating modes, and Kotter's vocabulary for naming it helps. Read alongside McChrystal's Team of Teams for a military-origin version of the same argument.