The Biology of Business: Decoding the Natural Laws of Enterprise - Hardcover

Clippinger III, John Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 078794324X ISBN 13: 9780787943240

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 1999

Synopsis

Increasingly interconnected, volatile, and complex, today's organizations cannot be controlled by any conventional approach to management. Indeed, an entirely new definition of what it means to manage is called for. In The Biology of Business, John Clippinger and nine outstanding contributors introduce managers to the Complex Adaptive System (CAS) of management, a system that takes into account all of the variables that impact modern enterprises and allows managers to take control from the bottom up. Here, the authors show how McKinsey & Co., Capital One, and Optimark have employed CAS to achieve specific business goals and improve overall corporate fitness. And they bridge theory and practice to provide managers with proven tools and techniques they can use to transform their enterprises into self-renewing, self-organizing systems that are maximally responsive to changing market conditions and opportunities.

About this title

Review:

The Biology of Business is a blueprint for sparking self-organization, knowledge, and rapid change in any company. Edited by John Henry Clippinger III, the book is a collection of 10 essays about the complexity theory of managing. Authors include top business professors and leading consultants from McKinsey & Company and Ernst & Young. A major theme: Traditional top-down management methods no longer work in an age of fast technological change and world competition. Instead, people must be free to manage themselves and come up with new solutions. The book's goal is to show how some companies are keeping "their enterprises balanced between order and chaos--in that 'sweet spot' where creativity and resilience are at their maximum," writes Clippinger, CEO of Lexeme, an Internet software company. For instance, Philip Anderson, a business teacher at Dartmouth College, recounts how Capital One became a leading credit card issuer and a major growth company by encouraging innovation among all employees. In another piece, called "Adaptive Operations," William G. Macready and Christopher Meyer highlight complexity techniques at General Motors, John Deere and Co., and Mohawk Industries. The book is for business leaders seeking new tools for managing in today's volatile business environment. --Dan Ring

From the Inside Flap:

As organizations become more and more interconnected, volatile, and complex, how can managers possibly anticipate, much less control, the myriad factors that determine their company's success? Simply stated, they cannot. In an age of hyper-change and hyper-competition, the traditional management strategies and techniques no longer work. A new approach is called for and its principles lie in the science of complex adaptive systems or CAS.CAS is nothing new. Its ability to provide powerful insights into how complex systems can evolve to become well-ordered, self-organizing entities has informed evolutionary biology and other disciplines for some time. Its truths have long been demonstrated in economics, computer science, and in the common marketplace. But not until The Biology of Business have the principles of CAS been translated into practical methods, tools, and examples that managers can use to make their organizations fit for the future.Here, John Clippinger and nine extraordinary contributors present the seven basics of CAS theory and show how to apply them to real-world business challenges including knowledge management, brand creation, market development, product innovation, and organizational change. They present case studies of how CAS is already being employed by McKinsey & Co., Capital One, and Optimark to improve organizational performance. And they explain how CAS can be used to keep an organization in that "sweet spot" between too much order and too much chaos so that it remains maximally responsive to market conditions and opportunities.In today's complex organizations, control cannot be imposed, but it can emerge if managers create the right conditions and incentives for it to do so. The Biology of Business teaches managers of such organizations how they can do exactly that-how they can transform their company into a self-organizing, self-renewing enterprise by creating order from the bottom up.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 078794324X
• ISBN 13: 9780787943240
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320