Managing Complexity, and Twenty‐First Century Capital

• Author: Stephen R. Goldberg,David M. Cannon
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.21991
• Date: 01 September 2014
• Published date: 01 September 2014

69

© 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

DOI 10.1002/jcaf.21991

Managing Complexity, and Twenty-First

Century Capital

David M. Cannon and Stephen R. Goldberg

BOOKS REVIEWED

Morieux, Yves, and Tollman,

Peter, 2014, Six Simple Rules:

How to Manage Complexity

Without Getting Complicated

(Boston, MA: Harvard Business

Review Press)

Piketty, Thomas, translated by

Arthur Goldhammer, 2014, Cap-

ital in the Twenty-First Century

(Cambridge, MA: President and

Fellows of Harvard College)

In the first book selected

for review, Six Simple Rules ,

the authors offer a new

approach to dealing with

complexity, which focuses on

cooperation between individu-

als within the organization to

achieve organizational perfor-

mance objectives. In the second

book, Capital in the Twenty-

First Century , Piketty using a

newly compiled and extensive

data set, studies the dynamics

of the distribution of wealth

between and within countries

around the world since the

eighteenth century and makes

policy suggestions affecting

social justice and order.

Six Simple Rules: How to

Manage Complexity Without

Getting Complicated

Today’s business environ-

ment is far more complex than

the environments in which the

seminal management theories

of Frederick W. Taylor and

George Mayo were developed.

However, management practices

based on their writings are still

widely used to address busi-

ness challenges. In Six Simple

Rules, authors Yves Morieux

and Peter Tollman explain why

management theories and prac-

tices of the past 100 years are

ineffective when dealing with

the complexities of twenty-first

century organizations and busi-

ness environments. They offer

a new approach that focuses on

cooperation between individu-

als within the organization to

achieve organizational perfor-

mance objectives.

The authors describe popu-

lar ways of dealing with com-

plexity as a “hard” approach,

based on rules, and formal

processes and structures, and

a “soft” approach, based on

changing the mind-set of indi-

viduals. Morieux and Tollman

contend that the hard approach

results in what they call “com-

plicatedness:” new rules, policies,

and organizational structures

and bureaucracy that attempt to

address any and every conceiv-

able contingency. They fault this

approach because it is highly

unlikely that any rule or process

can address any contingency

encounter, and individuals

become focused on rules rather

than an organization’s perfor-

mance objectives.

The soft approach “assumes

that what really matters is

emotional rather than financial

stimuli” and focuses on “affili-

ation activities, celebrations

… and display of appropri-

ate leadership styles.” This

approach deals with complexity

by attempting to change indi-

viduals’ mind-sets with respect

to their work and their organi-

zations. The approach likewise

undermines organizational

goals with its focus on an indi-

vidual’s psychological state and

emotions rather than organiza-

tional objectives. The authors

point out that both the hard

and soft approaches attempt