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

Pascale, Richard; Gioja, Linda; Milleman, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812933168 ISBN 13: 9780812933161

Publisher: Crown Business, 2000

Synopsis

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 U.S. 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.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Great storytelling, experience-based insight, and effortless prose convey a compelling message: Leading the talent-driven, distributed enterprise is the management challenge of the knowledge economy. The answers lie in complexity science, which provides relevant insights into the workings of living systems. Surfing the Edge of Chaos is the Rosetta stone, translating between real-world problems and exciting, illuminating theory. Pascale, Millemann and Gioja have at last made practical the idea of organization as organism."
-- Christopher Meyer, Director, The Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation, and author of BLUR: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy and Future Wealth

"Surfing the Edge of Chaos is a breakthrough book, achingly relevant for the New Millennium, by synthesizing new developments from the life sciences, social sciences, and physical sciences into an exciting framework that will help organizations and their leaders thrive and revitalize themselves in this post-modern, hypo-turbulent era. It has the added advantage of rendering subtle and complex ideas into readable prose by refracting the ideas through the prism of real-life organizations. This book will be must reading for any serious executive or student of organizational change."
-- Warren Bennis, University Professor and Founding Chairman of the Leadership Institute, University of Southern California, and author of Managing the Dream

"Surfing the Edge of Chaos is an action plan for bringing organizations to life and life to organizations. An organization is a living system that must adapt to a changing environment -- the same as species in nature. Thinking of a company as a 'well-oiled machine' or of yourself as a cog in that machine is a recipe for extinction. Richard Pascale, Mark Millemann, and Linda Gioja provide exciting new ways to think about the professional and personal challenges everyone faces today."
-- Prof. Gary Hamel, author of Leading the Revolution and coauthor of Competing for the Future; Visiting Professor, London Business School; and Chairman of Strategos

"Grounded in both theory and practice, Surfing the Edge of Chaos helps any manager facing change to replace equilibrium and the status quo with innovation and self-renewal. The links drawn between the world of nature and the world of business form a particularly rich source of ideas for turning complexity and chaos into resolve and results."
-- Dave Ulrich, Professor of Business, University of Michigan, and author of Results-Based Leadership

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown Business
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0812933168
• ISBN 13: 9780812933161
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336