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Title: The Living Company by Arie de Geus, Peter M. Senge ISBN: 0-87584-782-X Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: April, 1997 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.73 (15 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Insightful yet sarcastically entertaining.
Comment: I found this book to be a relief and escape to the way the corporate world has evolved. By taking a look at long living companies, the author has extracted some timeless advice for corporations to pay attention to. The thing that "lowered the score," so to speak is that there were hardly any statistics or hard numbers involved to back up his claims, regardless of the intuitive excellence of their teachings. If this book is to make a difference and it has the ingredients to do so, I thought some hard results outside of the longevity would have to be produced and they weren't. What I particularly liked was how the distinction was made between living companies and economic companies. More importantly, how people need to realize that you can't run a company with some of one philosophy and some of the other. You'll have to pick this up and read it to understand this, but I think if you do, you'll see that most companies are attempting to mix oil and water today and unfortuneately, I agree that they will be "dead before their time." Overall, this was a very insightful book and upon reflection to my own life, sarcastically entertaining.
Rating: 5
Summary: the living book
Comment: 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 some time 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 Startup's CEOs should had 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
Rating: 5
Summary: The Organization as the Organism !
Comment: 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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Title: The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge ISBN: 0385260954 Publisher: Currency Pub. Date: 01 October, 1994 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation by Kees van der Heijden ISBN: 0471966398 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 24 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World by Peter Schwartz ISBN: 0385267320 Publisher: Currency Pub. Date: 15 April, 1996 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Designing Organizations for High Performance by David P. Hanna ISBN: 0201126931 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 15 January, 1988 List Price(USD): $30.60 |
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Title: The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations by Peter M. Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, George Roth, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith ISBN: 0385493223 Publisher: Currency Pub. Date: 16 March, 1999 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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