Every few years a book changes the way people think about a field. In psychology there is Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence. In science, James Gleick's Chaos. In economics and finance, Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street. And in business there is now Surfing the Edge of Chaos by Richard T. Pascale, Mark Millemann, and Linda Gioja. 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. Pascale, Millemann, and Gioja argue that because every business is a living system (not just as metaphor but in reality), the four cornerstone principles of the life sciences are just as true for organizations as they are for species. These principles are: Equilibrium is death. Innovation usually takes place on the edge of chaos. Self-organization and emergence occur naturally. Organizations can only be disturbed, not directed. Using intriguing, in-depth case studies (Sears Roebuck, Monsanto, Royal Dutch Shell, the U.S. Army, British Petroleum, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems), Surfing the Edge of Chaos shows that in business, as in nature, there are no permanent winners. There are just companies and species that either react to change and evolve, or get left behind and become extinct. Some examples: Parallels between Yellowstone National Park and Sears show why equilibrium is a dangerous place in both nature and business. How Monsanto used a "strange attractor" to move to the edge of chaos to alter its identity and transform its culture. The unlikely story of how the U.S. Army embraced the ideas of self-organization and emergence. Why the misapplication of linear logic (reengineering a business or attempting to eradicate predators in nature) will inevitably fail. The stories in Surfing the Edge of Chaos are of pioneering efforts that show how the principles of living systems produce bottom-line impact and profound transformational change. What's really striking about them, though, is their reality. They are about success and failure, breakthroughs and dead-ends. In short, they are like the business you are in and the challenges you face.

This book on innovation management charts the shift to a more systemic view of creativity and the greater attention now paid to the role of tacit knowledge. Further it elaborates on the way in which cognitive style and personality type affect how we set about problem solving, decision-making and change, and the different kinds of culture organisations need to encourage creativity. It also disusses developing creativity and innovation, organisational knowledge creation, adaptors and innovators etc.

The Second Edition provides an overview of the theoretical and research foundation for our current understanding of organization change, including the nature and types of change organizations experience. The author reviews various models, including the one developed by Burke and Litwin, and uses cases to demonstrate how the models can be used to diagnose change issues in organizations. Emphasizing planned, revolutionary change over the gradual, evolutionary change organizations typically experience, Burke combines and integrates theory and research with application for insight into all aspects of organization change.

Creative Management and Development has been updated with newly commissioned and leading edge chapters on intuitive cognition, complexity, emotion, team innovation, development and well-being. The textbook retains seminal papers on creativity, perception, style, culture and sustainable development. The contributors to this textbook represent a broad spectrum of perspectives from among the most distinguished names in the field. They give a clear overview of the topics discussed whilst explaining their practical implications. This textbook is published as a Course Reader for The Open University Course Creativity, Innovation and Change (B822).

Offers an alternative way of thinking about management that is based on the management experience of uncertainty.

In this provocative new book, Dave Guerra introduces a new management science -- superperformance. He explains how ten premier organizations use the principles of Superperformance to moninate their industries and provides guidance your organization may use to achieve similar results.

Alan Hirsch is convinced that the inherited formulas for growing the Body of Christ do not work anymore. And rather than relying on slightly revised solutions from the past, he sees a vision of the future growth of the church coming about by harnessing the power of the early church, which grew from as few as 25,000 adherents in AD 100 to up to 20 million in AD 310. Such incredible growth is also being experienced today in the church in China and other parts of the world. How do they do it? The Forgotten Ways explores the concept of Apostolic Genius as a way to understand what caused the church to expand at various times in history, interpreting it for use in our own time and place. From the theological underpinnings to the practical application, Hirsch takes the reader through this dynamic mixture of passion, prayer, and incarnational practice to rediscover the dormant potential of the modern church in the West.