Rethinking the Company [antikvár]

foreword Mark Goyder When Alfred Einstein was asked if he ever wanted to study politics, he is alleged to have replied,'It's impossible. There are too many variables. Relativity is much simpler.' Outsiders, and some deluded insiders, believe business to be simpler. It is, after all, a world in which success can clearly be measured. Perhaps the real significance of the future developments which are charted in this book, and of the time through which we are living, is that such an oversimplified paradigm of business will no longer work. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is a mismatch between the pace and complexity of the world in which business operates, and the ability of the traditional company to handle that speed and complexity. I know nothing about cybernetics, but I am informed that it offers Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety. This tells us that: 'The variety of a regulator must equal that of the disturbances whose effects it is to negate.' (Ashby, 1956). This might be loosely translated and applied to future directions in corporate governance as: 'A company's learning systems must be as complex as the external environment in which it operates.' As all the chapters in this book demonstrate, the business horizon is changing rapidly, and becoming more complex. The boundaries are becoming more porous, whether between companies in the supply chain, or between competitors who also act as collaborators, between companies and educational institutions (both of which now strive with varying degrees of success to become 'learning organisations'), between workplace and home, between the traditional divisions and departments of the old hierarchical company. Old distinctions between manufacturing and services are looking increasingly meaningless. A manufacturer of specialised food-production equipment may have more resources invested in the applications engineers permanently on the customer's premises than in the original product. In a global market where no player has a decisive technology advantage, soft factors like reputation and perception may separate winners from losers. One thing is for sure: companies cannot be competitive in this environment if their own mental models are static and oversimplified. The RSA Inquiry Tomorrow's Company has been a conscious attempt by a group of leading UK businesses to re-examine their own model of business success, and to reconsider the external relationships that are crucial for the success of the company, and the measures and reporting mechanisms by which they manage to achieve that success. Every company has its own model of its critical business processes. Too few companies articulate these within the boardroom, let alone more widely. And the Inquiry is built on the recognition that companies, like