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THE NEXT COMMON SENSE
THE E-MANAGER'S GUIDE TO MASTERING COMPLEXITY
Michael Lissack & Johan Roos
The Next Common Senseleads the new wave of management science thinking in defining what it takes to master complexity and make sense of modern corporate life. Contrary to the popular notion that complexity can be either abolished or, worse yet, be left to raise havoc in the 'boundaryless' organisation, Lissack and Roos make complexity understandable and coherence practical as the new strategy for today's managers.
The old common sense was about how to deal with the seperate and free-standing units of a complicated world. The next common sense is about mastering the complex swirl of interweaving events and situations around us. Life is faster, more interconnected, interdependent and interrelated in the online communities of AOL than in the supply chain of an auto-maker. The world of work group relationships, strategic alliances and the customer networks we collectively call 'the organization' is about the effects of relationships between people inside and outside the organization rather than controlling distinct groups of employees, customers, suppliers. The new world is a complex one of arrows rather than boxes, of interactions rather than entities.
What worked as strategic advice in the old complicated world turns out to be just poor directions in the new complex one. Lissack and Roos demonstrate in a down-to-earth and practical way that mastering the complexity through finding, nurturing and communicating coherence are the critical tasks for today's managers and executives. With rich examples of how today's top companies - AOL, Southwest Airlines and Visa among others - have rejected traditional management practices to create the new organizational community of the future, they offer a five-step action plan for achieving coherence in complexity and detail the ten key management principles essential to the practice of the next common sense.
Michael Lissack is the chairman of Magi Inc., a knowledge management software company, and of Coherence Ventures, an internet incubator. Dr Lissack is also the Director of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence and an active member of IBM's Institute for Knowledge Management.
In addition to his writing, Lissack runs several annual complexity and management conferences for senior executives, moderates the COMPLEX-M internet mail list and discussion forum, teaches business ethics at the Rotterdam School of Management, and lectures on complex systems worldwide.
Johan Roos is the founding director of the Imagination Lab Foundation, and was previously Professor of Strategy and General Management at IMD in Switzerland.
A sought after speaker worldwide, he is the author of more than a dozen general management books, including Strategic Alliances, Managing Knowledge and Intellectual Capital.
"Mind expanding, beautifully written. Finally, a book that gets to the core of complex adaptive systems, revealing new ways to 'see' the world and to lead."
John Seely Brown, Chief Scientist, Xerox PARC
"A wonderful book... As we demand more flexibility and creativity of our organizations, the need has never been greater for unity, identity and direction - 'coherence', as these authors call it. How shall the leaders and members of organizations cohere in times such as these? Perhaps through the 'next common sense', a concept that calls on us to use fresh eyes and simple tools to interpret and shape a complex world."
Thomas Petzinger, author of The New Pioneers