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Books : Complexity Advantage ( Management )

Complexity Advantage

1. An employee is an autonomous intelligence problem solver. (Hierarchy of agents and leaders) (leadership is gain by competence and not position)

2. Groups of employees are attracted together in a self organizing manner lead by a leader with vision and comprehension. (Fractal patterns - simple algorithms which seem to have areas of attraction and recursion) - How many things do we do daily that have a recursive behavior pattern like simple algorithms we learned at college? Fractal thinking builds immense structure upon simple foundations.

3. Energy is the life blood of a group. Energy=complexity=awareness=product. Light and energy are first then product. The world is becoming more complex. Decentralized autonomous agents working in cooperative networks is the only way to accurately and effectively deal with complex systems. No one person knows everything about the system. The system is constantly changing and by transformed by the autonomous agents.

The autonomous agent seeks to remove behaviors that drain energy. The group with the best energy and cohesion called synergy profits. Profits= energy. Energy is better than money as a motivator because humans have emotion. A programmer integrates in with the group dynamic and learns and improves with the group. Plan, Decide, Act, and Evaluate is the continuous improvement model. It is better to have a reduction in group and maintain expected production demand verses bring new individuals into the group and disrupting the system.

4. A company is composed of numerous autonomous intelligent and responsible individuals committed to delivering satisfactorily products and service for his customer. Resources self organize according to customer need and requirements.

In conclusion, traditional organization management breaks down because it does not address the energy of groups and driving forces for excellence. Bureaucratic leadership is wasteful because it governs by fear. Fear is wasteful and inefficient. Planning is critical in fast changing environments. Planning brings together the elements of leadership, vision, and direction. Commitment drives innovation and problem solving. Energy ensures that the dynamics of the organization are fair. Non-Linear thinking suggest parallel development and multi-project sponsership with heavy reliance on heavy weight project managers.

It is often said the only way to get employees motivated is to "give them ownership" in the company. On the surface, financial coercion seems too work, but quality will suffer. A company with a good energy culture and environment will break traditional norms and work together cooperatively. Cooperation creates networks, group learning, and better coordination. Competition is a deadly hidden chasm. Two people competing against each other seek the destruction of the other. Whereas, coordinating and cooperative groups will share knowledge, modularize design for sharing, and communicate better.

Principle One: Build a model of trust that will empower the employee understand complexity and integrate in a self organizing system.

Principle Two: Create stand process on a large scale. "As leaders, we must work at all levels to help establish and sustain flexible, semipermeable boundaries that enable, yet contain, this self-organization. Each boundary will, by necessity, be binding, yet elastic, simultaneously a buffer and a conduit, requiring a far different supporting infrastructure than we've had in the past."

Principle Three: Business enterprises are better conceived on a network model. The biggest challenge is to use all the talent inherent in the workforce. "The opportunity to thrive as a learning, contributing individual and part of a successful global enterprise is equally compelling."

Principle four: Recruit diverse talent into the enterprise and thereby increase the potential for richer feedback.

Principle five:Drive out fear

Principle six: Build commitment across boundaries. Boundaries are used by system components to help in self regulation by containing energy and filtering information to prevent overload. Boundaries that stablize the system to much cause rigidity.

Principle seven: continuously improve by making team intentions, interactions, and interim status visible to team members that provides direction and feedback that will expand boundaries and resources.

Principle eight: Foster enterprise learning and new mental frames.

Principle nine: Share individual learning. Change is too rapid and time too short for all of us to keep up with everything that is occurring.

Principle ten: Teams share common urgency, purpose, understanding, and visible method of working-reciprocal collaboration-they become self-similar regardless of team composition.

Principle eleven: A mathematical and statistical model is generally much less expensive than a market trial. Eco-technicians toolkit: Power law describe a circumstance when one quantity can be expressed as a power of another quantity (motion of planets to sun, behavior of consumers to wealth); fractals are the expression of power laws. Patching meets a constraint within a larger perspective requirement. Patching may not yield the optimal solution to a problem, breaking the problem into medium-sized nonoverlapping patches with no individual conflicting constraints enables the solutions in each patch to be optimized. Cellar Automata simulate cell behavior over time. Effective Eco-techs identify patterns and construct models and scenarious; surface networks, connections, and ecologies; recognize boundaries, inflows and outflows, and feedback systems; determine factors, parameters, leverage points for maintaining bounded instability; and provide quantitative training, tools and coaching to leaders and catalyst. "In order to be effective, eco-techs should be palced at the highest levels of the organization." Eco-techs are best at modeling macro processes.

Principle twelve: By wasting the intelligence, reasoning power, and abaptablity of human beings, mindless compliance cause us to lose enterprise money and customers-not to mention the pride of those who capabilities are ignored. Remove waste.

Principle thirteen: New creative ideas and unique knowledge are the main resources that provide the enterprise with an edge.

Principle fourteen: Commit to sharing interests, motivation, talents, and information.

Creativity is not mechanical. Divine inspiration is genius. Mozart, Beethovan, and Einstein touch the divine.

Evolution can not deal with catastrophic change. Fitness equations and peaks can not predict the future. All biological algorithm have well defined constraints and require intelligence to formula the rules. Rules reduce the computation impossibilities hidden in genetic algorithms. Rules are discovered not evolved.

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