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protection against criticism in the real world where investors
lose money and employees lose jobs

 The degree to which the upward and downward causation
dynamic is recognized in the transformation process by
involving the parts (employees) in the reformulation of the goals

of the whole. The ‘core’ team of any organization needs to be
involved in the formulation of new goals and whatever
organizational values have an economic benefit.
 The way a business model Disruption is handled determines in

part the culture that will develop after the Disruption is resolved.
 Plus the simpler issue of finding an alternative economic model.

The world is full of opportunities, finding a new one is far less
difficult than ‘getting your act together’.

Recovery from Disruption is rare without a dramatic reframing of the

business such that it is practically unrecognizable. That said, even
dramatic change can leave elements of the old culture in place. When
IBM was traumatized in the early 1990s by its failure to respond to the
challenges of the PC age, it went through enormous change shifting

from a dominant manufacturing company to a dominant service firm
and shedding close to 200,000 people after decades as a lifetime
employment company. That said, those changes were on the surface, it

is arguable that they did not penetrate entirely into the core
administrative culture or change its inherited arrogance. When IBM
bought PricewaterhouseCoopers, it claimed to seek an entrepreneurial
stimulus; the two did not match.

As a final point, each Disruption, if the organization survives, leaves a
scar on its culture that will either make it more tolerant of future

Disruption or destroy it.

The Fact of Power

The interplay of up and down causation cannot be fully understood
without consideration of the effects of power. In the practical world of

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