Urged on by Pasekanos, we joined a group of half a dozen people in vigorous plate tossing, and danced amidst the mosaic of white shards. For us it was a wonderful way of throwing off the crimps of our transatlantic flight.

Afterward, we joined our fellow revelers around a big table and we began to talk. They were from Denmark, and in the textile business. They were traveling through Europe, checking on sources of fabrics they were using for their designs. "Business has changed for us," they told us. "How so?" we inquired. "Now what’s most important is paying attention to the people you do business with," they explained. "Business is not just commerce anymore; it’s about developing relationships. Honesty and connection is what we look for, in our employees and in our suppliers. You can see it in the eyes. What we’re building is a community; this is our leverage for business success."

What our dancing companions were saying reverberated deeply with us. We had been talking to various businesses in the United States and in Britain, and we were hearing a similar phenomenon occurring among them. A shift is taking place in the world of business, where valuing people and relationships is not just a good or espoused idea, but a conscious management action that has a positive outcome on the economic bottom line. We were hearing that by genuinely caring about people in the workplace, the economic bottom line often benefits as well.

This encounter at Anemos was in the fall of 1997. We were about a year into our study, which involved talking with people in a dozen companies, of different sizes and different business sectors. Some we interviewed several times, for a longitudinal perspective; and often we did a cross section of interviews, from CEO to secretary. We were interested in companies that were following principles from the new science of complexity in running their business. All we had to begin with was an understanding that businesses are complex adaptive systems, and the principles that underlie such systems. Some of the companies we talked to were using complexity principles explicitly to guide how they operated; others reached this place intuitively. It didn’t matter which was the case for our work. We found these organizations mostly by word of mouth.

We will delve into complexity science in more detail in later chapters, but suffice it to say here that the new science is the latest attempt to understand the structure and dynamics of complex systems in the natural world, including human social systems such as business organizations. Complexity science views such systems as being like living organisms, which adapt and evolve, rather than being like machines, which has been the traditional perspective. Companies whose management is guided by principles of complexity science are organizationally flat, have fewer levels of hierarchy, and promote open and plentiful communication and diversity. Complexity science argues that these properties enhance businesses’s capacity for adaptability, thus giving them a cutting edge in these fast-changing times. The companies we chose for our study therefore shared the properties of being organizationally flat and having rich, open communication. But initially we had no idea what our study would find in the realm of organizational dynamics, of management style, and people’s way of working.

What we began to hear consistently was a new way of doing business–from Babel’s family paint and decorating stores of thirty-five people, to St. Luke’s Advertising Agency of a hundred, to Monsanto Company of 22,000. For these organizations, people had become the new bottom line, not simply for humanistic reasons, but as a way to promote adaptability and business success. In today’s business environment of rapid change, a collective effort, a recognized need for others, becomes the means of survival and success.

Reflecting on the plate-throwing evening, we realized that this old tradition was a timely analogy for what we were hearing as being the current climate in these companies: breaking of old ways of doing things, seeking a new freedom, and trying to have fun while doing it. Pesekanos had told us that Anemos means "wind," which was apt, too, because a wind of change is blowing through the business world, bringing with it a new hope and a potential for a deep human resonance within organizations, which we all seek deep in our hearts. But it also brings anxiety, uncertainty, and fear, because it is predicated on far less control and far less predictability than is assumed in traditional management practice. Bending with these winds, business practice is becoming more like an improvisational dance on the broken plates of change.

The business world is in the throes of revolutionary change, a time when business leaders are frantically preoccupied with change itself. Modern management theory borders on being obsessed with change of one sort or other–how to generate it, how to respond to it, how to avoid being overcome by it. The reason is not hard to find. Pick up any newspaper, magazine, or business book and there it is: chaos reigns. At the cusp of the twenty-first century, we are experiencing structural shifts in our economy brought about by the revolutions in computation and communication technologies. But, as Intel’s Andy Grove indicates, change is not exactly a welcome guest in business: "With all the rhetoric about change, the fact is that we managers hate change, especially when it involves us."

The change is not only real, but it is also accelerating, driven by rapid technological innovation, the globalization of business, and, not the least of it, the arrival of the Internet and the new domain of Internet commerce. A new kind of economy is emerging–call it the information economy, the connected economy, call it what you will. The world of business is transforming, a shift that rivals the onset of the Industrial Revolution in its impact on society and the way commerce is transacted. With this shift, managers are finding many of their background assumptions and time-honored business models inadequate to help them understand what is going on, let alone how to deal with it. Where managers once operated with a machine model of their world, which was predicated on linear thinking, control, and predictability, they now find themselves struggling with something more organic and nonlinear, where limited control and a restricted ability to predict are the order of the day. No wonder most managers and executive professionals are uneasy, and eagerly seek new ways of coping. One thing is certain in all this, however: you can’t figure out what to do in the future by looking at how you did things in the past.

We attended many conferences on complexity science in business, which typically focused on computer algorithms that made difficult operational problems tractable. Time after time, at the end of the day we would hear people say, "This all has great potential and it will be important in business, we know that. But what about me? What about people?"

Yes, what about people? "Business is about people" has been bandied around for some time, and yet rarely addressed with a any human depth. Consequently, the feeling of not being valued is pervasive in the business world, and a few writers recognize the fact. "Too many people feel insecure, threatened, and unappreciated in their jobs," writes Tom Morris, a philosopher and business consultant. "Overall job satisfaction and corporate morale in most places may be at an all time low." Peter Senge, director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and author of The Fifth Discipline, notes that the prevailing mechanistic model of business encourages managers to see people as machines, not as people. "We deeply resent being made machinelike, in order to fit into the machine," he says. Henry Ford once said, "How come when I want a pair of hands, I get a human being as well?" A manager in today’s knowledge-based economy might paraphrase this: "How come when I want a mind, I get a heart as well?"

And how come there commonly continues to exist a denial in the business mind, a stark omission of the importance of people and valuing them for not only the revenues they bring in, but simply as human beings? How come we refuse to see the obvious–that when people are treated as replaceable parts, as objects to control, are taught to be compliant, are used as fuel for the existing system–that inevitably you are going to have an organization that is fraught with frustration, anger, and isolation, which ultimately is detrimental to the business?

Some managers recognize the lack of humanity in their organizations, and are frustrated with the perceived impossibility of doing anything about it, anything genuine that is. Alan Briskin, author and business consultant, quotes a manager in a large conglomerate as follows: "We’re so busy moving people around, trying to meet our deadlines, trying to influence people to believe in what we’re doing, that we just don’t want to really look into anybody’s eyes and see they have souls. We should start with the premise that we have souls. But souls are difficult to manage. And even if we talked about people having souls, it would probably be from a corporate viewpoint." The manager’s last point is that making "soul" into some kind of company slogan would be worse than not recognizing the existence of workers’ souls in the first place. But more to the point, trying to influence people to believe in what they are doing, without seeing who the person is, wanting them to be something for you rather than recognizing them for who they are, is an act of imposition, not engagement. To be blunt, it’s dehumanizing. And people will resist when they’re not included in the process and have things imposed on them.

Even Michael Hammer, one of the developers of reengineering, eventually came to realize that management is not just about organizational structures or process teams. In an interview in The Wall Street Journal, he admitted that in his enthusiasm to make companies more efficient and profitable he forgot about people. "I wasn’t smart enough about that," he conceded. "I was reflecting my engineering background and was insufficiently appreciative of the human dimension. I’ve learned that’s critical." Trust is critical if organizations are to excel, as the European business consultant Charles Handy argues forcefully in his recent book The Hungry Spirit. And trust was one of the major casualties in the rush to downsize in the name of reengineering. More than 70 percent of U.S. companies are struggling with low morale and lack of trust, principally as a result of the trauma of downsizing, according to a 1997 Wharton School survey. The same is true in the Europe.

"In the living company, the essence of the underlying contract is mutual trust," says Arie de Geus, a former senior executive of Royal Dutch/Shell. "Before they will give more, people need to know that the community is interested in them as individuals." An important reason why some companies fail, he says, is that "managers focus exclusively on producing goods and services and forget that the organization is a community of human beings that is in business–any business–to stay alive." It is common sense that if people are treated as machines, not as people, they are unlikely to give loyalty and trust–they will not give of their best. And yet, unfortunately, to use Voltaire’s phrase, "common sense is not so common."

Many companies that are anything but human-oriented in their management practices survive and even thrive, of course–for a time. "If you’ve drained the tank of human goodwill and motivation, you can continue to coast downhill for a while, even at a pretty rapid clip," observes Tom Morris, "but heaven help you if you encounter any big bumps in the road or the competition forces you into an uphill struggle." Senge is even more emphatic about the matter. "As we enter the twenty-first century, it is timely, perhaps even critical, that we recall what human beings have understood for a very long time," he says: "that working together can indeed be a deep source of life meaning. Anything less is just a job."

It is possible for people to be valued for themselves in the workplace, not just their function; for people’s souls to be nurtured and allowed to emerge where they work. In short, it is possible for work to be more than just a job, that work can be fulfilling and a life-enhancing experience, with all its trials, tribulations, and thrills. This is precisely what we observed for the most part in the companies we talked to.

To the manager who says, "This all sounds soft and unbusinesslike," beware: these companies are all very successful in traditional bottom-line terms, not despite being human-oriented, but rather, as many of the CEOs we talked with argue, because of it. To the executive who says, "Okay, that sounds easy, I’ll try it," beware: it’s not easy; it’s hard, perhaps the hardest of all management practices. And to the manager who says, "That sounds all well and good, but I can’t afford to spend time on relationships," beware: you are not getting the best out of your company. In fact, it’s more a question whether you can afford not to. It doesn’t have to be either/or, a dichotomy between money and people. In fact, it can’t be. Our world is too complex.

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