I have a friend who is a designer. When he talks about a company’s product he has the habit of saying things like “look what he’s trying to do here, it’s very clever, he’s obviously thinking of …”. This is for a product that is certainly not the production of a single person. My friend thinks design, so to him it makes sense to project a single, personalized, creative consciousness that he can relate to.

Here’s a recent message from another friend of mine: “I have concluded that my company does not deserve an employee like me. I have worked hard all these years, doing the best I can for each project, taking pride in everything I do. But I got passed over for promotion because I ‘did not show leadership qualities’. They are blinded by people who bullshit their way into getting their promotion. I'm done.”

My friend did not appreciate my coldly analytical comment that in his resentment towards his company he was acting like it was a real, single person who was out to get him. His anger is about his company, not just specific people, and he is angry about the way it treats him, as if its behaviour were both intentional and accountable.

Does it make sense to think of social bodies such as organisations like they were real people? The analogies from the more corporeal aspects of our existence seem to reap productive insight, as several comments to my previous posts attest. But when we get into trying to make a leap from the mental life of people to that of organisations, it’s a harder jump to make.

All living things seem driven at the most basic levels to self-repair. Multi-cellular organisms have a particular obsession with it – in fact, a cell’s inability to maintain its DNA undamaged is one of the primary triggers for what’s called apoptosis, or “programmed cell death”, when the mitochondria in a cell unleash a biochemical collapse. Single-celled organisms don’t seem so fastidious, and we can understand why.

To maintain a complex, interdependent biological system, with specialised cells performing specific regulated functions, it is important that the stability and consistency of the system be maintained. This is called homeostasis. Unregulated mutations and variability in function disturb the balance and the function of the whole. In fact, we have a name for it – cancer.

I am making my way through the The Strategic Mind and it is a very interesting read. David referenced the book on a recent post and I have always been impressed by his selections. However, the more I learn about complexity the more I note that personal ideology can often sway ones adherence to the implications of complexity. Specifically, it was interesting to consider Bob's opining on the global distribution of wealth as an "issue" and recent research findings by Geoffery West. Principallly, West's findings appear to indicate that social phenomena in cities (innovation, disease, cell phone usage, walking speed...) scale superlinearly (exponentially / dominated by power laws). If this is the case, and as Dr. West indicates more people are moving to cities, is it conceivable that wealth distribution is equally dominated by superlinearity and as result the "leveling" of the distribution is both an unhelpful goal, but also equally an unobtainable goal?

A fantastic journey awaits those who are interested. The crew over at Seed Magazine has put together a video that depicts the creation of the universe in 60 seconds. It is simply fascinating to see how much occurs in the last several seconds, and it seems to illustrate how little we know about the early periods of the universe (say from 1.0B years ago onward). That of course assumes that you don't prescribe to the bounce theory (my name) of the universe detailed here in the New Scientist. The notion that the universe theoretically recycles itself should find it's way into sustainability literature at some point in say, the next 1B years...

I hope to be able to write on a more frequent basis. If for no other reason that to catch the transient ideas that pass through from time to time. Perhaps I will make use of them, or perhaps someone else will. But at least, it is my hope, that something may come of them in some form one day.

A recent occupation for me has been a detailed observation of how passionately both my peers and my clients try to manage human interaction as though they were manufacturing cars. Exchanging the complexities of people for processes, procedures and the like, which while well intentioned can actually undermine their intent.

Yesterday was a prime example. I was shopping at Brooks-Brothers and they had a special on dress pants. One pair was $118.99 or two pair were $199.98. Effectively, by buying two you could save 20%. As it turned out I wanted three pairs of pants; however, I wasn't willing to pay $118.99 for the third pair. You can see where this was going, but sufficed to say the procedures at Brooks-Brothers dictate that the only circumstance where you can receive a pair for $99.99 is if you buy them two pair at a time. The lunacy of giving up the profit on the third pair of pants, which I did not buy, escapes me, but not them. They were following procedure.

In a similar story from a book I recently read, the author attempted to negotiate the price of a room at a hotel room in Manhattan. It was midnight, the hotel was not sold out and he would be gone by 6AM, so he offered the hotel $125 for the room (vs. the std rate of $250). The hotel clerk steadfastly refused to negotiate, because it was against procedure. Finally, the author escalated the matter to the hotel manager who "saw the light" and accepted the reasonable offer for a room that otherwise would have gone empty that night.

The irony that the procedures (adhering to pricing) violated the objectives (maximizing profit) in both cases is not uncommon. What I cannot reconcile is that so many times organizations and leaders fail to recognize that to attain our business objectives we have to provide a context for individuals to apply common sense and reason, not a process from which variation can be removed. I am sure we could all think of a million more examples...

This week I am at Yale for our company’s executive leadership skills class. I affectionately refer to it as reprogramming, but the experience has been both interesting and insightful. Today one of our professors, Jeff Sonnefeld, had to break during our class to be interviewed on national TV - CNBC. These things just don’t happen every day.

But beyond this, two events stick out thus far. The case study of Enterprise Rent-a-car and Hertz, to me, was almost an exemplar for the adoption of the principles and insights emerging from complexity science and the first principles of efficacious adaption listed by Bill McKelvey. Unfortunately, this greater insight was lost on both the teacher and the group. Instead we learned about the differences in their respective strategies (hiring, positioning, etc.). The overarching concept of how Enterprise applies light constraints and attractors to drive effective adaptation and ultimately enhanced market share and higher profit – totally lost.

Your thoughts and insights appreciated… personally, I hadn’t had much reason to consider the industry until this class, but based on what I learned I think Hertz’s local strategy is somewhat doomed to marginal success.

When a person lacks discrimination
And his mind is undisciplined, the senses
Run hither and thither like wild horses.
But they obey the rein like trained horses
When one has discrimination and
Has made the mind one-pointed. Those who lack
Discrimination, with little control Over their thoughts and far from pure,
Reach not the pure state of immortality
But wander from death to death; but those
Who have discrimination, with a still mind
And a pure heart, reach journey's end,
Never to fall into the jaws of death.

Talents are best nurtured in solitude, but character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Ideas about organizations are always based on implicit images or metaphors that persuade us to see, understand, and manage situations in a particular way. Metaphors create insight. But they also distort. They have strengths. But they also have limitations. In creating ways of seeing, they create ways of not seeing. There can be no single theory or metaphor that gives an all-purpose point of view, and there can be no simple "correct theory" for structuring everything we do. The challenge facing modern managers is to become accomplished in the art of using metaphor to find new ways of seeing, understanding, and shaping their actions

Before a man can decide what he will do, he must first determine what he will not do

人有不為也而後可以有為

Thanks to Danyll Wills