Customer Reviews

Corporate DNA: Learning From Life

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Goes beyond simply advocating that organisations should be thought of as living organisms, to work through the implications and challenges of this perspective in some detail. In particular, it takes the concept of a 'business ecology' (see eg. Moore: 'The Death of Competition') to develop rules for success in a world of 'punctuated equilibrium' - periods of relative stability followed by chaotic periods due to a destabilising invader or event, from which a newly shaped ecology emerges, with different dominant species.

While this is a highly simplified view of the formation of natural ecologies (and of the underlying complexity theory), it is still useful in looking at dynamic markets.

Part 1 looks at market ecologies. The framework is a generalisation of themes that recur in many other contexts. The idea of moving to preempt or build dominance in emergent market ecologies lies at the base of Hamel and Prahalad's strategy ('Competing for the Future'). Ormerod in "The Death of Economics' proposes that economies operate to precisely the same rule of punctuated equilibrium. Baskin goes on to draw out rules for business success in market ecologies.

Part 2 takes the same analogy inside the corporation, looking at the building of identity, the flow of information and development of the 'corporate nervous system', the issue of organic community structures and finally the role of senior managers, while Part 3 makes the distinction between change and transformation and highlights the differences.