Editorial Review:
Surfing the Edge of Chaos is a brilliant, powerful, and practical book about the parallels between business and nature—two fields that feature nonstop battles between the forces of tradition and the forces of transformation. It offers a bold new way of thinking about and responding to the personal and strategic challenges everyone in business faces these days.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Chaos and order are at the edge  2008-05-05
I read this book two years ago after being fascinated by the Chaos Theory and the butterfly effect on nature and mathematics. It gave me good insight on how the Chaos Theory is related to management studies. The topic came back to me when I saw recently a summary at Book Summaries Online of the CSTDI Cyber Learning Centre. The 10-page summary is quite comprehensive and gives a very good description of the main points of the book.
The scene is organizations being regarded as living organisms instead of machines. Thus four laws of nature from Chaos Theory are applied:
1. Equilibrium is death -When a living system is in a state of equilibrium, it is less responsive to changes occurring around it. This places it at maximum risk. There is also a well proven law of cybernetics - Requisite Variety - which states that when a system fails to cultivate (not just tolerate) variety in its internal operations, it will fail to deal with variety that challenges it externally.
2. Innovation takes place at the edge of chaos -In the face of threat, or when galvanized by a compelling opportunity, living things move toward the edge of chaos. This condition evokes higher levels of mutation and experimentation. The result is that fresh new solutions are more likely to be found.
3. Self organization and emergence occur naturally -When the right kind of excitation takes place, independent agents move toward what has been popularized as the "tipping point." New forms and repertoires emerge from the turmoil.
4. Organization can only be disturbed, not directed -Living systems cannot be directed along a linear path. Unforeseen consequences are inevitable. The challenge is to disturb them in a manner that moves directionally toward the desired state, then course-correct as the outcome unfolds.
The authors draw reference to Darwin. They go further to propose that the natural selection process come from selection pressure, that species do not evolve of their own accord. Rather, they change because of the forces, indeed threats, imposed on them from the environment. Such selection pressures intensify during periods of radical upheaval. The bottom line is that nature is more dedicated to proliferating life in general than to the perpetuation of any particular species. In a fair competitive environment, no organization has the ability to stay in a equilibrium. Change is the only way to stay alive.
The edge of chaos is a condition, not a location. It is a permeable, intermediate state through which order and disorder flow, not a finite line of demarcation. Moving to the edge of chaos creates upheaval but not dissolution. That's why the edge of chaos is so important. The edge is not the abyss. It's the sweet spot for productive change. But moving over the edge is to avoided.
The book extends the concept of fitness landscape from ecologists to the management area. The great plain is chaotic with customer defections, low margins, undifferentiated products, etc., while fit and successful organizations with their niches are represented as hills in the landscape. An organization grows and climbs a small hill to reach its summit. But in order to achieve greater height at another hill, it must first descend to the plain of chaos, get rid of its culture and build afresh. The journey is a sequence of disturbances and adjustments, not a lock-step march along a predetermined path.
One main point that defies traditional management theory is the trouble with optimization. Management likes to take the classic "blank sheet of paper" approach and optimize the inefficient system. This approach cannot anticipate every twist and turn in the execution phase. The law of unintended consequences reminds us that optimization seldom yields radical innovation. At best, it only maximizes the pre-existing model. It founders because efforts to direct living systems, beyond very general goals, are counterproductive. This seldom conforms to the linear path that we have in mind. This is why the misapplication of linear logic, i.e. re-engineering business processes, will inevitably fail.
The book proposes some guidelines in surfing the edge of chaos by disturbing but not directing the system.
1. Design, don't engineer.
2. Discover, don't presuppose.
3. Amplify, don't dictate.
There are more interesting points in the book. I recommend you to read it.
Biology is destiny for companies, too 2007-03-30
Managers should closely watch new discoveries in biology, especially the study of self-organization and emergence, particularly as the old hierarchical model of corporate organization becomes seemingly obsolete. Richard T. Pascale, Mark Millemann and Linda Gioja present case histories showing how corporate leaders executed turnarounds and solved critical problems by tapping the insight and intelligence of their organizations' members. In many cases, however, their success was only partial. It is to the authors' credit that they do not flinch from describing failures, even as they support the approach. They particularly note that stress can have the positive effect of forcing an organization to change its behavior. Though they first published their observations in 2000, some of their insights seem likely to endure the test of time. We recommend this book in confidence that executives can learn from its concepts about how natural systems can inform management.
Shoddy science research  2003-10-01
"Businesses...can learn a great deal from nature (p 3)". I wholeheartedly agree, but unfortunately this book does not deliver. The business research appears well done, but the science reserach that is supposedly it backing up is abysmal. The impression this book has left me is that the writers started with their theories and then handpicked some scientific anecdotes and (sometimes erroneous) generalities to support some of their claims, while other claims (like the Law of Requisite Variety) have no substantiation from the life sciences attempted. This is a backwards approach; I would have liked to see the authors examine the scientific research and then see what the business implications are. Three examples of erroneous generalities: 1. Endemic island organisms just "tweaking the status quo" (in reality, this is where the greatest diversity happens; its the 'weedy' organisms like starlings and dandelions that adapt by just 'tweaking'). (And I will try to ignore the goof about the dodo being from the South Pacific). 2. The idea that cooperation and altruism are major forces that organisms "seek" (in reality, these have been discovered to be incidental effects). 3. Equating the idea that 'every molecule in the human body replaces itself via genetic instructions' with the idea that 'human and corporate bodies are rejuvenated by fresh and varied genetic material'. Those are two very opposed statements. There is so much biological research that has major implications for organizational research that is lacking here: Memetics and primate social systems are two in particular. To conclude: The authors apparently have a poor grasp of the biological sciences, so that means their attempts at backing up their claims with biological reserach is suspect at best.
Read this or be left in the dust!  2002-04-09
Its funny. I was reading the review following this one and the person was saying how he could NOT find anything worthwhile to apply to his business. He must not have even picked up the book! I think there are plenty of great lessons within the book. Its not only a book about strategy, but a new framework to think in terms of. The world has changed greatly in the last 20 years and a lot of the old management frameworks have less significance. Complexity science is the new way to think and this book does a fantastic job of relating the "complex" topic to business. And the rules apply to all areas of the organization: strategy, organizational design, etc. If you want to be prepared to lead the complex globlal organizations of tomorrow, then this is a must read.
Can't see the use 2002-02-20
I read this kind of books hoping to find useful ideas for my business. Here I can't find any.
Even if one is just curious, the book is too full of platitudes. For instance, the Army chapter (in which I was genuinely interested) waxes high on gruelling experience, after-action review, and all that. But what's the big deal? Mutatis mutandis, I did the same in sports training twenty years ago.
PS: I think I got unhelpful votes from people disliking my Army comments, so I edited this review to better reflect what I mean. But let me make it clear: independent of any view of the military, this is a bad book.
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