The Next Common Sense. An E‐Manager’s Guide to Mastering Complexity

Abstract

From Publisher: The old common sense was about how to deal with separate and free-standing units of a complicated world. The next common sense is about mastering complex swirl of interweaving events and situations around us. Life is faster, more interconnected, interdependent and interrelated in online communities of AOL than in, for example, supply chain of an auto-maker. The world of work group relationships, strategic alliances and customer networks we collectively call the organization, is about effects of relationships between people inside and outside organization rather than about 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 old complicated world turns out to be just poor directions in new complex, internet-based one. Lissack and Roos demonstrate, in a down-to-earth and practical way, that mastering complexity through finding, nuturing and communicating coherence are critical tasks for today's e-managers and executives. With rich examples of how today's top companies - AOL, Southwest Airlines, Intel and Visa among others - have rejected traditional management practices to create new organizational community of future, they offer a five-step action plan for achieving coherence in complexity and detail ten key management principles essential to practice of next common sense.