“The Biology of Business—
Decoding the Natural Laws of
Enterprise”
By
John Henry Clippinger III, Editor
***
John Henry Clippinger states that today’s
organizations are so interconnected and complex that
conventional management cannot control them. Should a
manager just give up because it is too difficult?
Clippinger and others have developed suggestions for
thriving in ever-increasing complexity. Clippinger has
assembled nine essayists’ writings to introduce
managers to Complex Adaptive System (CAS), a science that
offers a new mindset for managing complexity using the
principles of self-organization. Examples from Biology
help us understand.
Clippinger introduces the biological term
“fitness” to characterize the capabilities
and the state of a company at a given point in time. The
challenge of an organization is how to survive in a
particular “fitness landscape” in which they
find themselves. Every complex system has a “sweet
spot” between excessive disorder and excessive
order where the system is responsive to the variety of
its environment, but sufficiently structured that it can
act and perpetuate itself. The goal of this book is to
help managers apply and understand the CAS principles in
order to move organizations toward that “sweet
spot.”
Clippinger references Holland’s “Hidden
Order” which outlines seven basic characteristics
for self-organizing: four properties—aggregation;
diversity; nonlinearity; and flows—and three
mechanisms—tagging; internal models; and building
blocks. Clippinger explains each and how they apply. He
reports that the role of the manager in the Complex
Adaptive System is one of tagger, labeler and keeper of
boundaries. The manager will be someone who can
facilitate the spontaneous generation of effective teams,
rather than the figure of authority for the team.
In Chapter 2, the author explains economic
uncertainty and reviews a stock market simulation that
demonstrated that the economy is cognitive. It can be
viewed as a complicated set of objects with linkages
between them emerging from our subjective beliefs; he
labels this the DNA of the economy. Chapter 3 has Andy
Clark suggesting that managers need to be a coach, nanny
and artificial DNA. In Chapter 5, Brook Manville explains
how McKinsey & Company utilized an adaptive knowledge
management system. Philip Anderson describes seven levers
for guiding an evolving enterprise in Chapter 6. Other
chapters and authors further illustrate CAS applications
to business.
Favorite quote: “Good
things—self-organizing processes that lead to
adaptive and productive structures—happen
automatically in any part of the system that is poised at
the midway point, on the ‘edge of chaos.’
“
Message that left a lasting impression: Manager as
artificial DNA.
This book has many interesting examples and concepts. The
references to Biology are interesting and novel. It is
difficult to read because of the different authors of
each chapter. Clippinger and others have done a masterful
job of assembling and editing which makes it flow better
than it might have.
“The Biology of Business,” John Henry
Clippinger III, Editor. (c) 1999 Jossey-Bass Publishers.
ISBN 0-7879-4324-x 277 pages.
Reviewed by Chuck Spooner, General Manager, MidAmerican
Energy Company, Muscatine, Iowa.
Book
Ratings:
*****
=
Pick it up today
**** = Overnight
it
*** = Snail mail
it
** = At a
library?
* = Never mind
March 2001 News for a
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Issue Highlight —
Someone To Watch Over Me
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