This book offers an innovative approach for overcoming the crisis of management in the face of complexity. The text fully explores this powerful tool, which is grounded in organizational cybernetics and systems dynamics. The book will serve as a sourcebook for improvement in many types of organizations, private or public, non-profit, large or small. The approach teaches managers and advanced students of management cope with organizational complexity in an effective way.

Klappentext

The systems approach in which this work is grounded enables the development of the new kind of intelligent organizations so urgently needed. Powerful models, based on organizational cybernetics and system dynamics, are presented in a way that lets the reader immediately apply them in practice. This book will be a rich source for improvement in any kind of organization, whether private or public, non-profit, large or small.

The new edition is updated and even more reader-friendly.

Zusammenfassung
This is not a book about how to run a company. It is about how to look at the world differently. Ultimately, this will help the reader to deal with complexity more effectively. The market today is flooded with books which claim to show paths to higher organizational effectiveness. Most of these recommendations are given as recipes for success and on pragmatic grounds. This book, however, is targeted at all those who want access to the powerful models of systemic manageme nt in order to improve their skills in coping with complexity. The contents are of interest to people who deal with organizations as leaders and mana gers or specialists, or as advanced students. The purpose is to give them conceptual and methodological guidelines by means of which they can. • Increase the intelligence of exis ting organizations by introducing or substituting a better design; • Shape new organizations so that they are intelligent from the very start. What are the distinctive features of this book? The book is the result of a long term research effort in to the deep seated, invariant features of organizations, ba sed on the Systems Approach, namely, Organizational Cybernetics and System Dynamics. These sciences have specialized in uncovering such basi c properties. They convey a fresh, sophisticated and unorthodox perspective. It is therefore worthwhile acq uiring the capability of looking at the social world in this different way.

Inhalt
Organizational Intelligence in Systemic Terms.- Complexity and Understanding.- Management A Distributed Function.- Intelligent Organization A Systemic Framework.- Activities: What the Organization Does.- Structure Preconditions for Effective Action.- Behaviour The Control of Cognition and Emotion.- Ethos and Identity: Basic Parameters of Organizations.- Time and Organizational Dynamics.- The Framework Revisited.- Outlook: The Way Ahead.