This is the tale of a great company, its rebirth and expansion, its glory days and steady state, and, eventually, its decline. The storyteller lived through these times and reflects on them through the lens of a scientist and humanist. He writes of many questions he needed to answer to complete his journey:
– What is wealth and how is it created?
– How is this surplus used to create even greater surplus?
– Why does the process decline during its natural life-cycle?
– In the organization responsible for success then failure, what is discussed and what is discussable?
– How does discussion manifest a local “truth” and how does it relate to power?
The tale is told in everyday language from the perspective of Gullivan, a mythical character in the tradition of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Yet the journey is grounded in the rigor and insights of physics, thermodynamics, information theory, cybernetics, biology and social science. It connects deeply to the grave problems we read of every today, from the scale of organizations to regions to countries and to the planet:
– What will bring us out of this bad economy?
– How can we return to growth and profitability?
– Will innovation solve problems of pollution, poverty, energy, climate change? What role can technology play?
These questions vex politicians, entrepreneurs, executives and managers everywhere, because 100 years of modern economic theory and management practice have not found answers. Yet the author has found answers through Gullivan’s journey, answers that are not available anywhere else — not in business schools, MBA programs, or even the boardrooms of global corporations and “centers of innovation”.
Anyone with courage enough to question the status-quo can make the same journey and understand what is required to innovate and to regenerate their own organization.