Organizational Principles

• Birth of the Chaordic Age by Dee W. Hock - Buy
  Birth of the Chaordic Age is a compelling manifesto for the future, embedded within the intriguing story of a personal odyssey. An engaging narrator, Dee Hock is the man who first conceived of a global system for the electronic exchange of value, becoming the founder and CEO of VISA International. He looks critically at today's environment of command-and-control institutions and sees organizations that are falling apart, failing to achieve their own purposes let alone addressing the diversity and complexity of society as a whole. The solution, Hock claims, lies in transforming our notion of organization; in embracing the belief that the chaos of competition and the order of cooperation can and do coexist, succeed, even thrive; and in welcoming in the chaordic age.
• Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World by Margaret J. Wheatley - Buy
  When Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science was initially published in 1992, it outlined an unquestionably unique but extremely challenging view of change, leadership, and the structure of groups. Many readers immediately embraced its cutting-edge perspective, but others just could not understand how the complicated scientific tenets it described could be used to reshape institutions. Now Wheatley, an organizational specialist who has since coauthored A Simpler Way, updates the original by including additional material (such as an epilogue addressing her personal experiences during the past decade) and reconstructing some of her more challenging concepts. The result is a much clearer work that first explores the implications of quantum physics on organizational practice, then investigates ways that biology and chemistry affect living systems, and finally focuses on chaos theory, the creation of a new order, and the manner that scientific principles affect leadership. "Our old ways of relating to each other don't support us any longer", she writes. "It is up to us to journey forth in search of new practices and new ideas that will enable us to create lives and organizations worthy of human habitation." — Howard Rothman
• Life at the Edge of Chaos: Creating the Quantum Organization by Mark D. Youngblood - Buy
  This breakthrough book provides practical applications of how to transform companies to operate on the "edge of chaos" based on the principles of living, self-organizing systems.
• Designing the Global Corporation by Jay R. Galbraith - Buy
• Designing Organizations for High Performance by David Hanna - Buy
• Organizational Transitions: Managing Complex Change by Harris & Beckhard - Buy