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interests were in the hands of a leadership elite, socially-justified as
being the representatives of the owners (or the owners themselves).
Over the last half-century-plus, as business contexts have increasingly

demanded flexibility and flat-organizations and the effective use of
skills, the balance has started to shift to a greater involvement of the
mass of agents in the formulation of systems-level interests (for want

of an 'official' term, we could call this upward causation).

This interaction of upward and downward causation is also the root of
culture formation both in the context and inside business systems.

Adapt to Context: Business systems are bounded but open to
external inputs to a greater or lesser degree and sit within a context
composed of millions of agents and other systems. The context is in a

continuous state of change at a greater or lower tempo as the agents in
the context interact. A system must adapt to the context changes at
both the system and task levels (see Ashby's Law). Where changes

affect only the task level, each agent/task must align with those with
which it interacts or synergy is lost and discord emerges. Where task
level alignment fails, the system will lose processing efficiency and
effectiveness and will create more waste or even bring about the

failure of the system as a whole as it becomes uncompetitive.

Dissipative: Systems theory jargon in the hard sciences, terms all
systems including all business systems as 'dissipative'. The
implication being that they are in a continuing state of decay under
entropic pressure. But, and it is a big BUT, organizations exist,

entrepreneurs found systems that grow and thereby create order and
structure. How does this happen?

Systems come into being by bundling endogenous energy (initial
funding, a founding team) to extract a constant inflow of exogenous
energy (resources, e.g., sales, investments) from the context. That

energy input allows the creation of order.

That said, as soon as the exogenous energy input declines, for
whatever reason, the system will start to collapse returning resources

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