Organized Complexity in Business Understanding, Concepts and Tools

This book explores a most central phenomenon in our contemporary businesses and organization, the growing complexity in business. Economic growth and growth of complexity always have been inseparable, but the last decennia the growth of complexity appears to outrun our growth of knowledge and understanding. For success and continuity, the modern firm in the developing complexity of its markets and societal contexts must have the capacity to master and exploit a commensurate level of complexity in its internal organization. This book is the first of its kind to help the reader to understand the different types of complexity and the different concepts and tools to deal with each of them in business administration, strategy, and organization. This book offers the reader a fresh perspective on conventional concepts and tools in the field of business administration and bridges these to new concepts as are being used to exploit new complexities. In the process, the reader becomes familiarwith the rich cybernetic concept of information, as a basis for the information-based organization and to master big data. With that complex decision-making is clarified and a fresh understanding of the core function of the organization, coordination, is offered for those who want to solve the issue of self-coordination. The book provides working examples but even more the strongest tool to master and to reduce complexity: a deeper and broader understanding of what is going on beneath the surface of what we experience daily. This book builds on Herbert Simon’s hypothesis of simplicity: ‘to use the simplicity of process to deal with the complexity of state.’ 

Part I: Understanding Complexity and the Economy.- Chapter 1 Introduction.- Chapter 2 Complexity 3.0.- Chapter 3 Simplicity and complexity.- Chapter 4 Definitions of complexity.- ­ Chapter 5 Economic growth, complexity and institutional conflicts.- Part II: Organizational Complexity.- Chapter 6 Information and complexity.- Chapter 7 Complex decision-making.- Chapter 8 Complexity and coordination.- Part III: Complexity in Practice.- Chapter 9 Examples of mastering complexity.- Chapter 10 How CEOs cope with complexity.- Chapter 11 Tools executives use to deal with uncertainty and complexity.- Chapter 12 Organization design and complexity.- Chapter 13 Complexity and management of change.- Chapter 14 A final word.- Index.

Johannes Strikwerda's career includes engagements with the Dutch government, Philips Electronics, KMPG-Consulting, and with the consulting firm Nolan, Norton & Co, where he was director of the Nolan Norton Institute. Since 1996 he teaches at the Amsterdam Business School (The Netherlands), and since 2000 as its professor of new organisational forms and organisational change. His topics of consulting are the design and transformation of multinational organisations and other organisations, in for-profit, non-profit, and government. He is a lecturer on strategy in the development program for members of supervisory boards organised by the Erasmus University (The Netherlands), and advises supervisory boards, including the writing of corporate governance codes. He is also a lecturer at SIOO, the national foundation for the education of management consultants in the Netherlands. He has written several books, two of which have received the Dutch management book of the year award. He is theauthor of 'Organization Design in the 21st Century: From Structure follows Strategy to Process follows Proposition', 'De Nederlandse Corporate Governance Code: Ingeleid, toegelicht en becommentarieerd' which is the handbook for corporate governance in The Netherlands. Other books are 'Bespiegelingen over governance, bestuur, management en organisatie in de 21ste eeuw', and with Jaap ten Wolde, 'Verplichte literatuur voor commissarissen en bestuurders'.