Knowledge and human capital have made a dramatic debut in the millennium
economy. Together they signal a critical shift in organizational life to something
new and different, especially when it comes to dealing with people. The best of
any company’s knowledge and human capital walks out the door, everyday, at
5:00PM. These two forms of capital are intangible; they have not been a part of
the traditional balance sheet. Capturing and increasing the value of these capital
assets requires a new set of skills. As many have noted, in the information age
“knowledge workers” have the leverage. And they carry their means of
production with them wherever they go.

The result is that management as a professional discipline is on the verge on a
major transformation. While management’s famous guru Peter Drucker insisted
that management is the organization’s single most important “organ,” he also
declared it is not possible to manage people. Rather, he stated, “the task is to
lead.” Lloyd Provost and his contemporaries at API teach us that it is only
processes that can be managed, and only then through the purposeful application
of continual testing and learning. Esther Dyson drew from the new science of
complexity, especially in the area of complex adaptive systems, (“CAS”) to
characterize this impending transformation through a different lens. The new
management acts in a distributed way, as an “immunity,” a capacity that
everyone can (and should) participate in and practice.

Superperforming management and leadership co-joins improvement and
complexity science to create a new approach that leverages both process and
culture together. This incredible new paradigm signals a fundamental shift away
from a mechanistic view and towards a view of organizations as living
organisms.

Bohr’s particle-wave duality. Faraday’s electromagnetism. Watson & Crick’s DNA molecule. Jung’s thinking-feeling opposites. Prigogine’s dissipative structures. Our own brains, with their left and right hemispheres – all point to the same glaring and pervasive pattern throughout all of nature — and in organizations too. Because of our mechanistic paradigm of organizations, it has been hidden before now. The Cartesian worldview is over 400 years old, and is reinforced through the almost century-old Taylor model, scientific management.

When organizations are reframed as living, complex adaptive systems (organisms), the simple heuristic of ‘manage process, lead people’ appears as the obvious and direct path to optimization. The evidence is that long-term market out-performers, i.e. Superperformers, all exhibit this pattern. The control that is called for is control of process, and the liberation that is called for is the liberation of spirit. The biophysics that guides this new paradigm weds the biology of improvement science to the physics of complexity science. Like Bertalanffy’s general systems theory, this new discovery transcends every business discipline, every domain. Performance Management, Talent Management, Project Management, Diversity Management, Knowledge Management, Change Management etc. . . . all give way, shifting in orientation from management to optimization, which joins management and leadership together as necessary and complementary hemispheres.

It is Performance Optimization, Talent Optimization, Project Optimization, Knowledge Optimization, and so on, that supplants management as the superior objective. Superperformers already know this and operate intuitively from this paradigm. Furthermore, this new knowledge recasts management and leadership: from a view of them as hierarchical locations to a view of them as distributed enterprise-wide properties, akin to your own immunity, consciousness, or nervous system.

Organizations of every type can access this new knowledge to reconstitute business strategy and transform performance.