Despite its uninspiring title, "The Biology of Business: Decoding
the Natural Laws of Enterprise" ultimately delivers on its promise to present
"a radical departure from traditional management thinking and practice." Edited
by John Henry Clippinger III and published by Jossey-Bass ($28.50, hardback),
"The Biology of Business" offers a series of well-focused essays by nine experts
in business, management, computing, and other fields.
They examine why, in the Internet age, company leaders should
quit using top-down control to impose organization. Instead, they write that
efforts should focus on helping organizations emerge naturally, from the bottom
up. Welcome to "complex adaptive systems" and survival of the fittest in 21st-century
business. Nature's elements, when left alone, continually adapt to their surroundings,
the essayists remind us. The elements "self-organize" to maintain a delicate
balance with their environments. When this behavior pattern is extended to business,
each company can be viewed as a self-organizing system, and a common set of
factors should determine how well self-organization actually works.
"The Biology of Business" draws from research by John Holland
and colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute, and it expands on descriptions of
the seven basics of self-organization in business. These include the four properties
of aggregation, nonlinearity, flows and diversity; and three mechanisms--tagging,
internal models, and building blocks.
The book provides reasonably clear definitions of each. And
tagging is singled out as especially critical. "Tags are a way of labeling and
giving significance to something, linking it to action," Clippinger explains.
Market prices, job titles and brands, to name just a few, are examples of tags
that help launch self-organizing behaviors. Top management can use tags "to
define the boundaries or membership conditions of an enterprise." And a company's
survival can depend on having the right tags assigned to its business focus
and core competencies.
A key goal for this book, Clippinger states, "is to move from
theoretical discussions to offering managers new methods, concepts, tools, and
examples to help them keep their enterprises balanced between order and chaos--in
that 'sweet spot' where creativity and resilience are at their maximum."
"The Biology of Business" is not a how-to book, however. The reader is challenged
to think, and rethink. The essays are targeted at leaders "responsible for organizations
that have become so interconnected, so volatile, and so complex that they have
become unmanageable by conventional means," Clippinger adds. Still, anyone seeking
to move into management may want to study this work. The new leaders will be
more like coaches and stewards, not dictators.
"When the business landscape is constantly changing and new technologies and
forces are coming into play, traditional wisdom and seasoned insight can prove
to be a disadvantage," Clippinger counsels. "Complex organizations behave differently
than simple ones. The past is often not a predictor of the future because technologies
can redefine the rules of the game." In short, the old notion of designing an
organization for a specific outcome is dead. Instead, aim for a range of desirable
outcomes, and then help the nature of business take its course.
