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

Christopher Meyer, Director, The Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Centre for Business Innovation Richard Pascale's great story telling, experience-based insight, and effortless prose convey a compelling message: leading the talent-driven, distributed enterprise is the management challenge of the knowledge economy. He shows that 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 has at last made practical the idea of organisation as organism.

In business, as in nature, there is no permanent winner - only companies and species coping with crises and challenges as best they can. Through the use of parallels between business and nature, this text provides a revolutionary way of thinking about and responding to the personal and strategic challenges facing everyone in the business world today. Written by one of the world's leading business thinkers and writers, the book shows that seeing companies as living systems is not a mere metaphor. Continuing to think about a company as a static machine - or yourself as a cog in that machine - means assigning the same fate as a species in nature faces when it fails to adapt to its evolving environment. For like nature, business today is a non-stop battle between the preserving forces of tradition and those of transforming change. But the ultimate lesson from nature is: equilibrium is a precursor to disaster. Companies that resist doing things that take them out of their comfort zone are unlikely to survive in the rapidly changing environment which surrounds them. Nothing can be safely predicted but chaos and discontinuity.