When Peters and Waterman wrote "In Search of Excellence" in 1982, it created the business book market. But great as it was, the book was not prescriptive. My wife and I discovered what makes - or prevents - excellence in any organization: It's the structure.
PrefaceThe Dandelion Principle: Great organizations that promote individual greatness are structured like families, and founded on respect for individual rights.“Why does organization seem to kill everything it touches?” My wife, N’omi, posed that question to me one day in 1982. This book is the result of our attempt to examine that question.Structure is Destiny: The Dandelion Paradox is about our near future—yours and mine—and about two main facts about that future: First, that it is going to be more confusing than any time we’ve ex-perienced in history; and second, that our normal accommodation of incremental change may not suffice to help us survive the changes now upon us.If we know where to look to see what’s coming, and have the nerve to look, we can know just what kind of changes we have to deal with. It’s the coping that’s the problem.For example, the usual preparations for change involve protecting assets. But that prop has already been washed away several times recently—the dotcom collapse, “Black October,” other economic disruptions—and it’s going to get worse.Sometimes people have prepared for change by having a place to run to. In our near future, there will be no place to run to. We must look it in the face and cope—or suffer. What is this terrible change that’s upon us? And what preparation must we make to meet it?The change is from a protected America to an America swept up in “the global society,” where the rules are different, and the good and ethical person seems at a tremendous disadvantage when faced by the strange and even incomprehensible behaviors of our own lead-ers and our global “partners.”Should we prepare for this by becoming base and immoral? I don’t believe that’s the path to take. I believe we should follow a path with which we are all familiar in private life, but which we do not often apply to business relationships. If we can learn to do well in business what we do well in private life—if we can follow the path that is powerfully represented by the Dandelion plant in each of its parts—we will survive the coming changes. How did I reach this conclusion?For years, I wondered why organizations made it hard for indi-viduals to become great. Even great organizations seemed to phase in and out of being greatness-encouraging environments—often quickly.(A colleague has suggested that it is incorrect to say “organizations made it hard,” as if the organization were a sentient entity. And yet, at the heart of this book is my belief that structure is destiny for organizations. So a choice, by people, of organizational structure re-sults in inevitable constraints. Hence, I believe it proper to make organizations and their structure active participants.)Then, in 1982, Tom Peters’ and Bob Waterman’s In Search of Excellence was published, and seemed to offer some direction. But the book turned out to be purely descriptive, not prescriptive. That is, it described the results of excellence, but it didn’t tell how to become “excellent.”The missing ingredient in In Search of Excellence, however, was announced in its first chapter: It was structure.
Excerpt
Natural to every human being are certain collaborative abilities. We’re designed to live and work with other people: Our family. To the extent our working groups and organizations resemble our family, we know how to navigate. We know how to find our way.
To the extent that an organization differs from our family, we are alienated by it; we experience it as an uncomfortable, inhuman place.
Learn to profit from the Natural Cycles of the stock market.
An illustrated introduction to the relationship between planetary orbits in the solar system and periodic cycles in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Practical application
