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Every few years a book changes the way people
think about a field. In psychology there is Daniel Goleman's
Emotional Intelligence. In science, James Gleick's
Chaos. In economics and finance, Burton Malkiel's
A Random Walk Down Wall Street. And in business there
is now Surfing the Edge of Chaos by Richard T. Pascale,
Mark Millemann, and Linda Gioja.
Surfing the Edge of Chaos is a brilliant,
powerful, and practical book about the parallels between
business and nature -- two fields that feature nonstop battles
between the forces of tradition and the forces of transformation.
It offers a bold new way of thinking about and responding
to the personal and strategic challenges everyone in business
faces these days.
Pascale, Millemann, and Gioja argue that
because every business is a living system (not just as metaphor
but in reality), the four cornerstone principles of the
life sciences are just as true for organizations as they
are for species. These principles are:
- Equilibrium is death
- Innovation usually takes place on the
edge of chaos
- Self-organization and emergence occur
naturally
- Organizations can only be disturbed,
not directed
Using intriguing, in-depth case studies
(Sears Roebuck, Monsanto, Royal Dutch Shell, the U.S. Army,
British Petroleum, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems), Surfing
the Edge of Chaos shows that in business, as in nature,
there are no permanent winners. There are just companies
and species that either react to change and evolve, or get
left behind and become extinct.
Some examples:
- Parallels between Yellowstone National
Park and Sears show why equilibrium is a dangerous place
in both nature and business.
- How Monsanto used a "strange attractor"
to move to the edge of chaos to alter its identity and
transform its culture.
- The unlikely story of how the US Army
embraced the ideas of self-organization and emergence.
- Why the misapplication of linear logic
(reengineering a business or attempting to eradicate predators
in nature) will inevitably fail.
The stories in Surfing the Edge of Chaos
are of pioneering efforts that show how the principles of
living systems produce bottom-line impact and profound transformational
change. What's really striking about them, though, is their
reality. They are about success and failure, breakthroughs
and dead-ends. In short, they are like the business you
are in and the challenges you face.
Richard T. Pascale is the coauthor of
The Art of Japanese Management and author of Managing
on the Edge. He has written for The Harvard Business
Review and for twenty years was on the faculty of the
Stanford Business School. He is now an associate Fellow
of Oxford University, a writer, and a consultant.
Mark Millemann was a senior advisor to
CSC Index and has extensive experience working with CEOs
and executive teams of companies around the world, including
Sears, Hughes Space and Communications, BP Oil, Borg Warner
Automotive, and the Illinois Power Company. He is the founder
of Millemann and Associates, a management consulting firm
based in Portland, Oregon.
Linda Gioja has consulted with CEOs and
executives at such companies as Allstate, Sears, and Hughes
Space and Communications. She now leads dialogues in national
policy forums at the Aspen Institute and for the California
Environmental Dialogue, a group of more than twenty energy
companies, automakers, high-tech companies, and environmental
organizations working on the state's environmental policy.
She lives in Austin, Texas.
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