The Biology of Business

"Because complex systems adapt from the bottom up, there is no way of planning for change, and the goals and policies of organizations are emergent and indeterminate."

"A company can be highly adapted to its past business environment yet quite ill equipped to cope with its current and future business environment."

"A company's fitness is a function of how well it is able to respond to and anticipate the changes in its business environment."

"Tags are the indispensable tools of management."

"How far and how fast an idea travels through an organization is often indicative of its value."

"The manager fosters an environment of managed chaos."

"Until a new order emerges?a new grammar of product categories, market roles, and relationships?the Internet market will continue to be inherently speculative. "

"Heterarchies are characterized by minimal hierarchy and by organizational heterogeneity."

"In place of the therapies, recipes, formulas, and blueprints of designer capitalism, post-socialist firms have had to adopt a different strategy."

"Survive in order to innovate."

"It is always within accounts that we "size up the situation," for not every form of worth can be made to apply, and not every asset can be mobilized, in a given situation."

"The volatility of the late twentieth-century economy creates steep challenges, especially for companies that are slow to react to market shifts."

"The World Wide Web is perhaps the quintessential modern example of a self-organizing system."

"An agent-based model provides a framework for decision-making components (agents), such as animated birds, molecules in a gas, employees in a firm, machines in a factory."

"A Genetic Algorithm takes business data and treats it like a genetic material."

"A business seeking solutions to a problem must scan the search space?the set of all possible solutions to the problem. "

"The depth and precision of description of just about every product and service is increasing."

"It is almost dumbfounding that trillions of dollars in futures contracts are traded daily by hollering and handwaving."

"With the coming of global computer networking and an increasingly deep model of reality embedded in information systems, the ability to express object and desire in many nonfinancial markets also increases."

"The Internet has created a need for new doctrines that apply to on-line transactions and that can be enforced on a global basis."

"Self-organizing systems now have a new medium in which to form, and they cooperate on-line independently of any piece of paper filed, for instance, in Delaware."

"If increasing the flows across previously meaningful boundaries causes unwelcome randomness, keep the flows going but allow good tagging to help users avoid unwanted content."