At the ABI Steve created, developed and pioneered the sense-and-respond (www.senseandrespond.com) concept of adaptive business design.  He coined the term in 1992, and introduced it to a larger audience in a 1993 Harvard Business Review article with Richard Nolan that has become a classic. Through his courses, articles, speaking engagements and consulting activities he made "sense-and-respond" an integral part of the business strategy vocabulary.  His book, Adaptive Enterprise, provides organizational leaders with a comprehensive framework for adaptiveness, introducing important new principles for business strategy, structure and governance. The book, now in its second printing, has been translated into several languages, and is the basis for successful classes and lectures given at the ABI and at leading business schools. Other publications have appeared in several books, and as articles in the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Planning Review, Marketing Management Magazine, and The Journal of Interactive Marketing.

An advisor to senior executives at a wide variety of private sector, not-for-profit, education and public sector organizations, Haeckel is an international authority on customer-value growth strategies. In 2003, he became an Advisor to the Office of Force Transformation’s “Sense & Respond Logistics Project” in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He is a frequent speaker to executive audiences in the United States and abroad. Business strategy, marketing, knowledge management, information, and human resources executives have been particularly interested in understanding the implications of adaptive, customer-back business designs for their disciplines.

Haeckel’s IBM career included responsibilities as a marketing executive in Europe and on IBM’s corporate staff, where he headed the project that resulted in IBM’s decision to enter the commercial systems integration business.  He was a coauthor of IBM's successful services strategy.

Haeckel is an adjunct faculty member at the IBM Advanced Business Institute, and a founding member of the Homeland Security Council of the American Management Association.  From 1985 to 1986 he served on the Advisory Council of the Federal National Mortgage Association. In 1994, he was named to the panel of judges for the McKinsey Awards, which recognize the two best articles published each year in the Harvard Business Review. He has engineering and MBA degrees from Washington University in St. Louis.