Page 40 - The Complexity Perspective 20 02 18

 Life-Cycle Effect: A business system has a life-cycle, which
may be long or short but which is a small fraction of the time of

the context. Moreover, the business lifecycle has an enormous
impact on the upward and downward causation interaction by
placing demands on the mix of people required. For example,

Geoffrey Moore proposed the following for a firm developing an
promoting a new offering category:
o In the early stages, highly creative people to invent the
offering, research indicates such people are driven by a

need for originality, are collaborative, and seek a learning
culture of great flexibility
o In the mid stages the firm dives up the secular growth

curve, the dominant strategic issue is sales. Such people
are driven personality by status and a need for power and
seek/create highly competitive cultures
o In the late stages as the business matures the competitive

requirement is for optimization of processes etc. The
appropriate people are oriented to stability and efficiency
through regulation.

Research has shown that some groups are incompatible both
strategically and in terms of personality and achievement
orientation, specifically the early creatives and the later
optimizers. This has an enorous impact on the evolution of

culture as the mix of players changes.
 The Founder Effect: And then there is the founder effect (a
case of initial starting conditions). In business, a firm is founded

and the only employee is the founder whose goals are the goals
of the system. As the founding team expands, the interplay of
founder’s goals, personality, attitudes toward winning, and

values and those of the team comes into play in an intense
interaction around a common goal. It is common here for
founders to imprint on the organization and for that imprint to
last through generations of employees as it dissolves into myth

(e.g/, Watson in IBM).

40
©Business Games Works 2018 (Version 1)