Customer Reviews

Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics: The Challenge of Complexity

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

 

 

There is much new in the latest edition of Ralph Stacey's management text. Of special merit is his challenge to those interested in understanding human organizations as complex adaptive systems to remember that these organizations are comprised of humans, not computer agents or ants. He asks us to be wary of simplistic transfers of complexity principles into the management domain. He then offers the theory of "relationship psychology" as an alternative and explores its implications for understanding the mind and healthy, creative organizational dynamics, putting the human back in the complex adaptive, or as he suggests, responsive, system.

Ralph Stacey has done more than any other management theorist to examine the intersection of complexity science and organizational thinking. He has been intelligently, provocative and challenging all along and has helped this intersection advance. You'll always want to stay in touch with what he is saying.

Simply put this is the worst textbook I've ever read. If there was a negagtive star rating I could give it, I would. Stacey's attempts to draw analogies between business and other completely unrelated topics are overdone, belabored, verbose, and very frustrating. This book continually causes me to ask the question "Is the author going to make a point before the end of the chapter?" This book was an assigned textbook for a course I am taking so I am being tortured and forced to read it. Strange and wacky thinking doesn't equal innovative thinking!!!

If you don't have to buy it, DON'T and then beg the instructor to change his/her mind and switch to another textbook.