Weaving Complexity and Business: Engaging the Soul at Work - Softcover

Reviewed in Fincareer, 17 May, 2001 - "Investment bankers on their next transatlantic flight could do well to stop by the airport bookshop and pick up a copy of "Weaving Complexity and Business." Its authors do a lot in just over 300 pages to explode the myth that mergers and acquisitions bring lasting benefits."

How to organise companies and compete successfully in today's fast-changing, high-tech business environment by understanding and applying Complexity Science. The business world is in the throes of constant, rapid and unpredictable change. Everywhere we hear that a new kind of economy is emerging from rapid technological innovation. Faced with these profound changes, leaders and managers are finding that many of their background assumptions and time-honoured business models are inadequate to help them understand what is going on, let alone how to deal with it and survive. Traditional, mehcanistic models of business, which were predicated on linear thinking, control and predictability, worked well enough in the past. But it is being overtaken by the need for a more organic, non-linear way of working, where limited control and a restricted ability to predict are the order of the day. This book brings business people a new way of thinking about and working in thnew economy, one that draws on the new science of complexity, which recognises that business organisations are complex adaptive systems, in which people are crucial but unpredictable factors in their development. It offers managers an companies a deeper understanding of the organisational dynamics of toda's fast-paced/changing business environment both within companies and among them. Moreover, the book outlines a new theory of business that places human-orientated management practices under a theoretical umbrella of complexity science. The book also contains detailed case studies of successful UK and US companies that have embraced the principle of complexity science.