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

Few business books capture so well the drama of today's business landscape. The Internet, increasing global competition, the after effects of the dot com boom: today's businesses face an unprecedented range of threats. The theory posed by Surfing the Edge of Chaos is that such threats are only natural--in fact, today's business laws are parallel to the laws of nature: evolution creates survivors, genetic mixing breeds stronger descendants, moving too far from core values results in chaos.

Much like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, this book blends scientific information with social comment and history. The biochemical concepts used to illustrate how companies live, grow and die are explained, meaning that readers without a scientific background aren't disadvantaged. Using examples largely from the high-tech community, Pascale shows how Silicon Valley giants such as IBM and HP--once heralded as the finest companies in the market--saw coming changes in the landscape, yet failed to adapt. IBM missed the opportunity to capitalise on open architectures and lost the PC operating system battle to Microsoft, while HP became mired in bureaucracy.

There aren't many books that would liken Monsanto's move from plastics to genetic engineering to galactic dust coalescing into a star: this one does. The adaptive leadership of the company's chief executive, Robert Shapiro, is credited with Monsanto's heady success in the 1990s. His failure to understand the nature of complexity is crucial in the company's subsequent fall.

If life is indeterminate and unknowable, if we can all be killed by avalanches, why bother? There are no wholly reassuring answers, but some guidelines can increase the chances of survival. In business, the game can be chess or roulette--it helps not to confuse the strategies appropriate for each. The objective is to synthesis all the pieces together. Key disciplines can sustain the vitality of a living system (specifically corporations) over time.

It's an intriguing premise, and even if you don't agree with Pascale, his arguments bring life to some of the most dramatic corporate stories of the last 20 years. --Sally Whittle

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.

Surfing the Edge of Chaos is a brilliant, powerful, and practical book about the parallels between business and nature - two fields that feature nonstop battles between the forces of tradition and the forces of transformation. It offers a bold new way of thinking about and responding to the personal and strategic challenges everyone in business faces these days.

Richard Pacale is the coauthor of The Art of Japenese Management and author of Managing on the Edge. He has written for the Harvard Business Review and for twenty years was on the faculty of the Stanford Business School. He is now an associate Fellow of Oxford University, a writer, and a consultant.

Mark Millemann was a senior advisor to CSC Index and has extensive experience working with CEOs and executive teams of companies around the world, including Sears, Hughes Space and Communications, BP Oil, Borg Warner Automotive, and the Illinois Power Company. He is the founder of Millemann and Associates, a management consulting firm based in Portland, Oregon.

Linda Gioja has consulted with CEOs and executives at such companies as Allstate, Sears, and Hughes Space and Communications. She now leads dialogues in national policy forums at the Aspen Institute and for the California Environmental Dialogue, a group of more than twenty energy companies, automakers, high-tech companies, and environmental organizations working on the state's environmental policy. She lives in Austin, Texas.