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The Living Company: Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment (平装)
by Arie de Geus
| Category:
Strategic planning, Corporate planning, Sustainable growth, Business |
| Market price: ¥ 198.00
MSL price:
¥ 168.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A great book that will help senior executives and board members, and you, to gain insights into sustained success. |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 12 items |
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James (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
This profound and uplifting book is for the leaders in all of us. Arie de Geus challenges most of the conventional wisdom in management thinking today. |
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Frances Hesselbein (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
Arie de Geus gives leaders of the future an indispensable guidebook in which commitment to values, people, learning, and innovation defines the living company. It's in my book bag. |
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Francisco Varela (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
In the recent boom of books about management in changing, turbulent times, Arie de Geus's stands in a class by itself. Unlike other writers, de Geus has spent an entire life doing that kind of management for one of the world's largest companies. Conceptually coherent and eminently practical, The Living Company is the genuine expression of a remarkable man. |
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Chris Turner (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
Every manager in America should read The Living Company. Arie de Geus makes a powerful and logical, yet gentle, case for managing organizations as communities of human beings instead of as economic entities. A brilliant book from a masterful storyteller. |
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Graham Lawes (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
Companies die all the time. The current business climate favors short term profit over long term survival, and most companies don't adapt fast enough. De Geus explains why this is, and what we can do about it, but what makes this book an essential read is that he gives us a new way of looking at organizations and the meaning of work.
The problem is that, in management, you get what you reward. This is a well-known truth and explains the dysfunction we see in most companies. As de Geus puts it, "The difficulty lies in our definition of corporate success...the dominant school of thought in business administration measures success purely in terms of quantity: the maximization of revenues, market share, share value, or proceeds."
The solution de Geus comes up with is novel and revolutionary. It is to look at companies differently - not as machines, but as living beings. In fact, he goes even further than this, saying that companies actually are living beings. It is only because they are living that they can learn and adapt and hence sustain themselves over long periods of time.
This view seems extreme, but it is soundly based in philosophical argument and it is preferable to the alternate view that companies operate like clockwork and their employees are simply assets. The complexity of organizations can indeed be understood better by analogy with human psychology and biological ecosystems. And a company is able to survive and learn only because it has an identity that outlives any of the people working within it.
Arie de Geus draws on the work of leaders in the fields of psychology, philosophy, evolutionary biology and immunology. He agrees with other management writers like Drucker, Collins and Buckingham on basic management truths, like the need to focus on strengths and develop people continually so as to maximize their effectiveness. However, he provides fresh and original insights on management and helps us look at our organizations in a new way.
For example, the natural consequence of thinking of organizations as living beings is that a company's primary goal becomes survival. This in turn leads to a different way of looking at the company's people. The company will survive only if there is synergy and an underlying contract between the company and its members whereby the members are helped to reach their potential in return for support of the company's goals.
Many years ago, I read Peter Senge's book, The Fifth Discipline, and its depiction of the learning organization became an ideal for me. I didn't expect to be as profoundly affected by The Living Company, but the ideas are, if anything, even more basic to finding meaning in work, and will likely stay with me. This book is essential reading for any leader wanting to build a sustainable company, but it's also thought-provoking for anyone who wants to make change happen in any organization.
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
This is a must read for all those people who are interested in the subject of organizational learning. The book illustrates clearly the challenges companies face in encouraging its employees to learn. Also, it provides a lot of examples and strategies from Shell. Overall, it is an excellent for any person, even if they are not in a managerial position in a company. If the reader is such a position, then this is a must read. |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
For the health care business, this is a time of tremendous change and discontinuity. The approach shown in this book seems to be the most useful of any that I have seen in the (many) strategy books I've read, because it acknowledges the fact that we can't tell what's going to happen and gives a way to deal with the resulting environment. If you really decide to go with his techniques, I strongly recommend that you also buy Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation by Kees Van Der Heijden (Wiley). He worked at Shell also and his book is very practical, with good advice on how to implement a scenario planning process. |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
In reading a business book, so many of us are seeking competitive advantage for our respective businesses in the form of a new strategy, tactic, policy or any combination of the preceding three elements. This book however is bigger than simply the above elements, as it describes a business philosophy. Arie de Geus is a respected business scenarioist and strategist. He developed his craft over many years in a leading multinational organisation and therefore is well equipped to talk about globalism and evolution. This book passes on that craft in the form of a circumspect view from a man consumate in the art of business. He proposes that businesses be: receptive (sensitive) to the commercial environment and opportunity; have an all embracing organisational culture; tolerant of new ideas and have a conservative approach to financing and investment. But above all he proposes that the raison d'etre of companies is not simply profit, rather it is corporate longevity through embracing the above four propositions. He also suggests that today's principal corporate activity is simply a current commercial phase capable of being superseded by some other activity at some later date. In other words, our respective successful business activities and opportunities are only today's fashions! Equipped with such a suggestion, perhaps we are all able to better approach our strategising with renewed objectivity and circumspection. |
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Romulo Correa (MSL quote), Brazil
<2007-01-11 00:00>
If I have to stay with only one business book in my shelf (I have more than 300 in the last count), the living company would be this book. My review will be more emotional I think. This is so, because the way this book touched me. I read it three times and I think I have to read it again.
This is a very similar with the Built to Last, one of the bestsellers of Amazon. If you liked that book this will be an excellent complement of your reading and thoughts.
Perhaps this is the book that a Startups’ CEOs should have read before launch their enterprise, because one of the characteristic of a living company is that they are conservative in their finances.
De Geus wrote a book that it is not limit to a period of time like recent books dot com books. By this I mean that you can go back to it and reapply its contents in your business reality again and again.
An import thing to say is that this is a book of principles, not rules or easy steps to success. Although the author is going to show you that there is a pattern in all the living company, he goes beyond that, showing the root that origin these patterns. The principles was constructed by observing companies, specially Royal Doutch/shell, were Arie de Geus worked for many years, but with the help of other disciplines like psychology and biology, which study the behavior and life of humans and animals. To discuss about innovation for instance, you will observe how a specie of bird is very smart to pass a learning to the whole specie. And to understand how we react or anticipate an external change in our business, it will be useful to look some psychology's theories about the human mind, and so on.
Don't think this is a book for academic public, it is not. You will find not only theories but many examples and cases of the thesis of De Geus. But it is different, I think, of the recent business book. Some times it seems so easy to look a successful company today and says "look, this is what you have to do in your company". A couple of years ago you could find many books explaining why Netscape was so great. Where are Netscape now?. It would not pass in the test of time.
So if you are only worried to make your money no matter what is going to happen to your company, this is not a book for you. Probably you are Jim Clark type. Read the new, new thing instead. But if you thing that management is more than stock options (I said more. I am saying that is a consequence not the only objective), if you believe the every company must have a reason to exist, if you believe the people are important, than I guarantee, you gonna like this book, tell me about it. |
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Gautam Ghoash, India
<2007-01-11 00:00>
Arie de Gues is known to some management students as the person whose research spurred Peter Senge to do work on the "learning organisation". In this book Arie talks about the evolving notion of the organization as a living being, instead of just an "economic entity" whose main purpose of existence is to survive, fulfill its potential, and to become great. Plain talking and cutting free from jargon, Arie illustrates this idea with examples from his career in Royal Dutch Shell and the studies Shell had carried out on long lasting and big organizations (they found only around 40 odd!). This book needs to read by entreprenuers, business people and academicians to look at their organizations as some thing else apart from a money making machine ! Revolutionary!! |
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1 2 | Total 2 pages 12 items |
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