out or becoming brittle. It values diversity, biological and otherwise, and underscores the case with ecological metaphors that make corporate executives feel like lions in a National Geographic special.
Most important, it assumes that individuals (even ants) are autonomous and work in their own local interest, and that management should organize on that basis, rather than trying to instill ideology about sacrifice for the sake of shareholder value. "People used to think that when you had a group of people together, the individual was less important," says Bar-Yam. "But in a complex system, each individual becomes important in the context of the whole, and that's what's so startling. You can have both individual importance and group importance at once."
This circle-of-life ethos strikes a near-perfect philosophical chord with a business culture that yearns to resolve cooperation and competition, enlightened management and ruthless execution, personal freedom and corporate focus. Complexity theory pushes all the right motivational buttons. Better yet, it does so with computer simulations, intelligent agents and references to physics, biochemistry and global climate change. It's got visual imagery that blows away the pies and flowcharts of industrial-age management. Fractals. Snowflakes. Fireflies. Not epic things like stars and planets anymore. In management, as in science, it's the small things that fascinate us now. Industrial-age business had the big bang to inspire it. We have termites. There is progress after all.
J.C. Herz is the founder of Joystick Nation, a consulting firm in New York.
