An interview with richard t. pascale

An interview with Richard T. Pascale
Interview by Sarah Powell
A leading international business consultant and bestselling author, Richard T. Pascale is an Associate Fellow of Templeton College, University of Oxford. For 20 years he was a member of the faculty of the University of Stanford Graduate School where he taught a course on organization survival, the most popular course of the MBAprogramme at the time. Dr Pascale has worked with CEOs and top management worldwide as a general management advisor and expert on strategic transformation. His clients have included Goldman Sachs, Coca Cola, Levi Strauss, AT&T, General Electric, Marriott, Royal Dutch/Shell, British Gas, Cable and Wireless, Ciba Geigy and Intel. He has also consulted to government and not-for-profit organizationsincluding the World Economic Forum, UK Ministry of Defence, US Army, Department of Interior and USAID. Richard Pascale has authored or co-authored numerous books including Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business and the bestselling The Art of Japanese Management. His 1990 book, Managing on the Edge: How the Smartest Companies Use Conflict to Stay Ahead, receivedcritical acclaim as one of the best business books of the decade. Dr Pascale was also a recipient of the McKinsey Award for best article in the Harvard Business Review. The BBC dedicated a series to his work and he is the subject of a four-hour video on Transformation available through the BBC Executive Video Series.

You write that you were initially sceptical about the application to management ofnature’s laws, and indeed gave a lecture at the Santa Fe Institute’s business network entitled: ‘The Irrelevance of Complexity Science to Management’. What prompted your initial scepticism and what led to your later conversion? Richard T. Pascale: I am sceptical of ‘soundbites’ and faddish language in promoting business ideas. Complexity science struck me as yet another thesaurus for buzz words. Icompiled a chart of business ‘fads’ over the period 1950 to 2000 (based on the number of times a business idea was mentioned in the American business press). Until the mid-1970s, two or three ideas would emerge every five years or so and enjoy a very long ‘shelf life’. Beginning in the mid-1970s, rapid technological developments and globalization began to impact on business. The chart depicts avirtual tidal wave of business ideas, often ‘packaged’ for maximum emotive impact. Shelf life shortened dramatically. The business ideas sector was behaving like the fashion industry. This trend continued for two decades and tapered off when the ‘bubble’ burst in 2000. The brake

was not solely the demise of dotcom mania. There was parallel realization in the marketplace that many ‘new’ ideaswere ten years old, repackaged in new-age language. This is not to say that all the business ideas of the period were devoid of merit. Some, such as total quality management, reflect a profound and robust management approach. Many of the best ideas foundered because organizations tended to apply them like a coat of paint on top of ‘business as usual’ – so they failed to bring about the desiredtransformative effects. A superficial relationship with these ideas and their subsequent ‘failure’ fed managerial cynicism. When one of the co-authors of Surfing the Edge of Chaos first proposed that we explore complexity science through the work of the Santa Fe Institute, I was sceptical. How could something so remote have any deep relevance to business? As you mentioned, I was invited to speak thereand subsequently joined as Visiting Fellow. I immersed myself in the literature, spent hours with mentors Stu Kaufman, Murray Gell-Mann and Brian Arthur. I concluded that there are indeed some common properties to all living things that have great relevance to business. These became the framework of the book: 1) prolonged equilibrium is a precursor to death, 2) innovation occurs near the edge of...