bestselling paperback

THE LIVING COMPANY

GROWTH, LEARNING AND LONGEVITY IN BUSINESS

Arie de Geus

"Extraordinary practitioners like Arie make unique contributions to manage-ment thinking . Because the source of their thinking is experience rather than concepts, they show how sometimes the most profound ideas are the simplest. At the heart of this book is a simple question with sweeping implications: What if we thought about a company as a living being?"
From the Foreword by Peter Senge

A purely financial and economic view of companies had its place when capital was a scarce resource and it was management's duty to optimize its use. But today's scarce resource is knowledge and knowledge is created by a company's human assets, not its capital assets.

This, now more than ever before, makes a company into a living work community, instead of a collection of assets on a balance sheet. It demands completely different management approaches and requires the language of biology, anthropology and psychology for further insights. And in leading today's modern corporation, management must think in terms of "learning" as the main process through which the company can flourish and hold its own in a competitive market.

This readable, thought-provoking and highly original book explores these themes and develops in depth what organizational learning means. It investigates the consequences of building a sustainable work community for human resource management, strategic planning and organizational structure. It makes a case for a thorough public debate on corporate governance and on the reallocation of power, both inside and around the company.

Arie de Geus gained a wide reputation for his work in his role as Group Planning Coordinator for Royal Dutch/Shell. Widely credited by Peter Senge and others with originating the concept of "the learning organization", and the author of an influential Harvard Business Review article "Planning as Learning", he is a visiting fellow at London Business School, and a board member of the Nijenrode Learning Centre in the Netherlands.