The Chaos Frontier: Creative Strategic Control for Business - Hardcover

Stacey, Ralph D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0750601396 ISBN 13: 9780750601399

Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd, 1991

Synopsis

The Chaos Frontier: Creative Strategic Control for Business presents the effective ways of managing and controlling innovative organizations in chaotic times. This book discusses the theories of chaos and self-organization developed by mathematicians, biologists, chemists, and physicists. Organized into four parts encompassing 13 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the scientific sense of chaos as those systems driven by certain types of perfectly orderly laws capable of behaving in a manner that is random and therefore inherently unpredictable over the long term. This text then examines the key elements that managers need to incorporate into a dynamic model of managing if they are to design effective actions in a turbulent business world. Other chapters consider organizational effectiveness and the ability to sustain competitive capability. The final chapter deals with creative interaction between a business and the other organizations and people that are its environment. This book is a valuable resource for managers.

About this title

Synopsis

The purpose of this book is to introduce senior business executives to a new scientific way of explaining the creative behaviour of dynamic systems, one of which is the successful business organization. It is a way of thinking and understanding which makes more sense of a highly uncertain business world than those explanations to which managers currently pay explicit attention. It points to more effective ways of managing and controlling innovative organizations in turbulent times and provides a framework within which we can more easily understand what managers actually do as opposed to what they say they do. This new way of understanding dynamic behaviour is to be found in the theories of chaos and self-organization developed by mathematicians, physicists, chemists and biologists. In its scientific sense, chaos does not mean utter confusion or a complete lack of any form. It means that systems driven by certain types of perfectly orderly laws are capable of behaving in a manner which is random and therefore inherently unpredictable over the long term, at a specific level. But that behaviour also has a "hidden" pattern at an overall level. Scientific chaos explains why we observe recognizable patterns of overall behaviour, or categories, within which no two individuals or events are ever exactly the same. Chaos explains feedback behaviour, the self-reinforcing virtuous and vicious circles which are so familiar in business life. Scientific chaos explains turbulence as the chaotic stage which systems experience as they change from one form to another. Water passes through a turbulent state to become steam. And business organizations too pass through turbulence as they develop new strategic direction. The widespread applicability of chaos and self-organization explanations has been demonstrated in nature's systems. And the central message of this new way of understanding how the world works is revolutionary because it tells us that creativity, innovation, significant change, new strategic direction, are all dependent fundamentally upon conditions of disorder, ambiguity, chance and difference. Successful systems do not function like machines or gradually adapting organisms. Instead, they develop and control over the long term through an unpredictable, creative, spontaneous self-organizing process which depends inherently upon chance. This book argues that chaotic dynamic apply as much to successful business organizations as they do to nature's systems.

Edition details

• Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0750601396
• ISBN 13: 9780750601399
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 422