Nurturing reliable, creative, nimble organizations
The Open Source model continues to confuse and frustrate theorists and managers alike on exactly where its strength lies. What is its ability to innovate and provide lasting value in the marketplace? A business perspective on the lessons for traditional hierarchies. [...]
Friedrich Hayek characterized complex systems with two main properties; the number of variables, and the connection between them. Hayek was describing the properties of scale free networks. Beginning in the 1990s, scientists revived the study of network research, at least partly after they noticed that scale free networks predominate in virtually every discipline or instance where nature constructs complex systems. [...]
Everyone has the innate ability to innovate, create, fail, and adapt if only the rules allow it. Given the proper combinations of elements, reliability and creativity can amplify together, much as reconstituted wood chips form a bond stronger than the original tree. [...]
Organizations both in their structure and their strategy often make bets against the individual, and they continue to do so in pendulum like swings in both micro and macro trends. Like the computer hardware industry, they always eventually lose. [...]
Maslow considered physical needs as the most basic. Obviously if a person is hungry or cold, they have no time for higher conceptual arguments, friendship or philosophy. Physical needs, or base needs also presuppose a stable, holistic foundation, and it is in this analogy that we wish to develop our concepts. [...]