Pepper in the Pot

I've been reading through Peppers and Rogers Rules to Break and Laws to Follow. They articulate strong core ideas about efficiency, innovation and the organizational manifestations of greatness and dysfunction along these lines. Don spoke at a Canada Post Direct Mail seminar I attended recently and I asked him if he thought there was more innovation in organizations now than has been the case in the past.

 

The book partly answers that by pointing to the rapid expansion of technological innovation. My interest is on the social ingenuity side of the ledger - the challenges we face in finding more adaptive social and organizational structures. It would have been good to speak at greater length about it but the book provides some great examples of business enterprises that really get it right and others that have floundered.

There is brief mention of complexity theory but the themes underneath their discussion traffic through many ideas that are driven by complex systems thinking.