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

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

Review
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.

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