Using Chaos to Reinvent Business. - Brief Article - Review - book review

When I was a graduate student, my dissertation chairman honored me with an invitation to write a chapter for his new book. In that piece, I set out mathematical models for predicting states of equilibrium, ranges of stability and limits of organizational behavior. The book didn't sell well, but my mother and her bridge group are still pretty impressed with my part of it.

That experience aside, I remain intrigued with the learning opportunities and apparent insights we can find using nature and science to investigate organizational phenomena. Surfing the Edge of Chaos now has wedged itself into a handful of my favorite books in that genre, along with Engines of Our Ingenuity, A History of the Natural Senses, and March and Simon's classic Organizations.

Surfing looks at institutions as living systems. The authors frame the discussions around four principles:

* Equilibrium is a precursor to death because that is when a system is most comfortable and least responsive to change--and therefore at greatest risk.

* When threatened, living systems move toward the edge of chaos where experimentation and mutation spawn new and unique solutions.

* New, more adaptive response patterns emerge from this turmoil.

* Organizations with the greatest chance of survival are ones in which leaders continuously disturb the status quo with purposeful change. They note that operating a business near the edge of chaos requires a high degree of leadership finesse.

This is an extremely well-written book. The prose is nicely crafted, the examples are interesting and enlightening, and the stream of thought has a consistent flow from start to finish. I'm not altogether convinced that the authors have, as they state, "seen the future and have wrapped it between the covers of this book." However, they do offer a fresh approach and provide engaging analyses.

The authors have extensive business credentials.

Pascale is an associate Fellow of Oxford University and was on the faculty of Stanford Business School for 20 years. Millemann is founder of Millemann and Associates, a management-consulting firm, and formerly was senior adviser to CSC Index. Gioja has been an executive consultant and now leads dialogues in national policy forums at the Aspen Institute and for the California Environmental Dialogue.

To amplify their logic, the authors cite examples in the world of nature and then find parallels in the world of business. For example, a living system is prompted to abandon its comfort zone or equilibrium state by "attractors." These attractors align the elements of the system in a particular direction and provide the impetus to move out of the comfort zone. For example, the response of a colony of fire ants to a disruption of the nest is a unified, simultaneous sting--which occurs only after all the ants are in place and ready.

For the business parallel, the book describes the leadership of Robert Shapiro, CEO of the Monsanto Corporation.

According to the authors, Shapiro recognized the value of natural science as a guide for shifting Monsanto's mindset from stodgy to inspired. To do this, he infused his vision with a "strange attractor"--the nobility and possibility of Monsanto's taking the lead in eliminating world hunger. He built the mission around synthesizing the company's skills in life sciences, agribusiness and bioengineering for the good of humanity, thereby rekindling professional pride and refocusing personal energies.

The illustrations from nature are fascinating and enlightening--and are useful tools for understanding the book's terminology and thrust. However, these illustrations are not predictive. It is simplistic to think that we can study nature and extrapolate the findings to human organizations. Nature is too diverse, diffuse and complex to make such direct comparisons.

The book draws examples from many places, but the authors use six organizations to make their primary case. Even though the activities of Monsanto, Hewlett Packard, Royal Dutch/Shell, Sears, BP and the U.S. Army are well known and meticulously researched, the sample is too small to provide statistical comfort in the interpretations. Initially, I also was concerned that the six-company review would end up a patchwork of reports, but the authors have woven the material into a sensible and interesting whole.

For the uninitiated, using life systems as a basis for business study can be confusing. Surfing the Edge of Chaos attempts to remedy the potential problems of new definitions, vocabulary and language by framing the approach around seven integrative "disciplines." This concept is the heart and soul of the work, and it can serve as fertile ground for future research into cause and effect relationships in organizations.

Despite its few noted shortcomings, Surfing the Edge of Chaos is a substantive and worthwhile piece of work. The authors may not have unmasked mysteries of the future, but they have helped us have a much clearer picture of the present.

Steve McIntosh, Ph.D., is president of Tartan Consulting and is a founding partner of the Southern Leadership Institute, headquartered in Bonita Springs, Fla.

Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business by Richard T. Pascale, Mark Millemann and Linda Gioja, Crown Business Publishers, 2000, 320 pages. List price: $26.95. ISBN: 0-8129-3316-8.

Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business

By Richard T. Pascale, Mark Millemann and Linda Gioja Crown Business Publishers, 2000

COPYRIGHT 2001 Society for Human Resource Management
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group