"Corporate DNA" explores what happens when managers think about and run their companies as if they were living things. An organic model is at the heart of the transformation of companies like AT&T and EDS, working to redesign the bureaucracies that they were built upon. This book addresses the frustrations felt among corporations by focusing on the role of the organizational models in the transformation process. The book's key perception is that the choice of a mechanical or organic model results in an organization's developing either mechanical or organic structures. Those structures, in turn, lead to certain types of behaviour "Corporate DNA" provides tools with which managers can replace their old mechanical models with organic ones. Readers will discover how living things use information to create work; how they learn, develop and govern themselves; and how prototype organic corporations such as 3M and Federal Express apply organic models to their operations.

Corporate DNA explores what happens when managers think about and run their companies as if they were living things. An organic model is at the heart of the transformation of companies like AT&T and EDS, working to redesign the bureaucracies that they were built upon. This book addresses the frustrations felt among corporations by focusing on the role of the organizational models in the transformation process. The book's key perception is that the choice of a mechanical or organic model results in an organizations developing either mechanical or organic structures. Those structures, in turn, lead to certain types of behavior. Corporate DNA provides tools with which managers can replace their old mechanical models with organic ones. Readers will discover how living things use information to create work; how they learn, develop, and govern themselves; and how prototype organic corporations such as 3M and Federal Express apply organic models to their operations. Ken Baskin, Ph.D., is a consultant on communicating quality and culture change. In addition to his own public relations business, he has worked for the US Department of Energy, the New Jersey Department of Education, and Bell Atlantic, including speech writing for CEO Ray Smith. Ken leads workshops on |Creating Competitive Advantage in a Market Ecology| and |Using the Principles of DNA for Problem Solving,| among others.

We all Dance to the Music of Story. That's what recent work in anthropology and neurobiology is telling us: our brains turn events around us into the stories that become the music for which our acts are the dance steps. As biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon puts it, "We tell stories about our real experiences and invent stories about imagined ones, and we even make use of these stories to organize our lives. In a real sense, we live our lives in this shared virtual world." Stories, these researchers suggest, are the maps by which we navigate the territory of the world around us, and learning to listen to the music of story improves the art with which we dance our lives.The essays in Dance to the Music of Story begin to examine this virtual, storied world, exploring the implications of this perspective on how people interact, as illuminated by the principles of another provocative field of studies, Complexity Theory. This field explores the dynamics of evolving phenomena in nature - from the atomic and molecular scales to those of the ecological and cosmic; in this way, it offers a unique way of treating social phenomena, which are also many-scaled evolving phenomena, from the personal to the organizational, the professional to the national. By integrating recent research in storytelling and complexity, these essays offer the possibility of a new perspective on studying human interactions, which we call storytelling complexity.Using this perspective, the writers of these essays address a series of questions to explore many familiar terrains in different and illuminating ways: How do people transform the overwhelmingly abundant world around them into the stories that enable them to interact? What are the ethical dimensions of storytelling, especially when manipulation is the storyteller's emphasis? What are the implications for storytelling complexity in organizations? In the end, these essays are an attempt to "open up a space of research," in Foucault's words, a first move in a language game which readers can try out and, if they find it worthwhile, join in with.