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THE BOOKSHELF
The
following books, though not written or published by THE
CENTER FOR ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT, present
views which are consistent with the teachings of the Adaptive
Management Model.
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Built to Last,
James Collins and Jerry Porras, 1997, Harper Business Press, New York.
This book reports on the results of a fairly extensive research project
into the "best of the best", a set of 18 companies (17 American
and 1 Japanese) that have been hyper-successful over a protracted
time period. Similar in style and scope to Tom Peter's In Search
of Excellence book of the early eighties, these authors focus
on those characteristics that really set their "visionary"
companies apart. Their list turns out to be largely a description
of the properties of successful adaptive systems.
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The Living Company,
Arie deGeus, 1997, Harvard Business School Press, Boston. DeGeus reports
on an extensive study by Royal Dutch Shell into those characteristics
of very long-lived companies that enabled long term survival. Similar
in intent to Built to Last, this book settles on just four
main themes, three of which parallel our resource, relationship and
scaled responsibility concepts. The fourth theme, "sensitivity
to the environment", focuses on the process of mutual co-creation
between an organization and its environment. The superior profitability
of long-lived companies is seen as a consequence of managing in order
to create a healthy living system, not as a primary management goal
in itself.
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The Knowledge Creating
Company, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, 1995, Oxford
University Press, New York. Two Japanese business professors explore
how Japanese companies create new knowledge, including many case examples
of innovation. The crux of their analysis hinges on a distinction
between "tacit" and "explicit" knowledge and a
discussion of how the most successful companies are able to turn the
former into the latter. What emerges is a pretty picture of how to
operate effectively in the "B Realm".
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Life at the Edge of
Chaos, Mark Youngblood, 1997, Perceval Publishing, Dallas,
Texas. The title refers to the narrow space between total chaos and
stifling bureaucracy, within which adaptive organizations exist. Youngblood
provides the best discussion I've seen to date of "new science"
concepts applied to organizational management. He focuses on transforming
the mental framework of modern business management from "Newtonian"
thinking to "Quantum" thinking. His discussion of the culture
of quantum organizations is very close to the Adaptive Management
Model.
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The Clock of the Long
Now, Stewart Brand, 1999, Basic Books, New York.
Journey with the author as he discusses creating a 10,000-year clock
that serves both as symbolic and actual thinking for the long term
and higher scale. Using the terms "Long Now" and "Big
Here," this book is a must read for a better understanding of
time as a resource, as well as a fresh look at scale and the B realm.
The theme of assuming responsibility for the future shows that "steadily
engaging in the future teaches us wariness about events and trust
in each other. We don't know what's coming. We do know that we're
in it together."
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Sources of Power:
How People Make Decisions, Gary Klein, 1999, The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts. In this well-researched study,
Klein concludes that most experienced decision-makers do not follow
the traditional process for making decisions, but instead rely on
an intuitive response to situations. His naturalistic decision-making
understands that linear thinking no longer works in our complex world.
The findings force us to view our A realm activities in a different
light as we recognize the importance of experience and the need to
train novices to use rational strategy approaches.
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Competing on the Edge,
Shona L. Brown and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, 1998, Harvard Business
School Press, Boston. Looking for examples of balancing
structure and chaos within an organization? You will find them in
this book, which discusses specific organizations that function with
“controlled chaos” such as Nike, Microsoft and the Atlanta Braves.
Referencing the environment, not just the competition, is another
similarity to the Adaptive Management Model. The ten rules of strategy,
organization and leadership provide further thought for dealing with
ambiguity.
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