The Living Company

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Summary: This book is must reading for any leader or aspiring leader!
Review: Arie de Geus is probably the most unique business thinker around. He combines the pragmatism of someone who had a very successful career at Shell with the curiosity of a talented academic. Behind this unique perspective is a deep appreciation for people. Most of us automatically relate to organizations like Newton related to the natural world, as one big physical mechanism. We casually talk about "aligning parts of the organization", "operating in organizational smokestacks or silos", and "fixing communications channels". Mr. de Geus helps us learn to think about organizations from the natural perspective, as living organisms, subject to many of the same limitations and forces as individual people are. When you read this book, you will become a much better and more effective person in all parts of your life. You will also feel better about yourself, and make those around you feel better about themselves. Read THE LIVING COMPANY today. This book is a wonderful gift to us all!

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Summary: This experience is like a busines trip to the Galapagos!
Review: Arie De Geus turns on its head the idea that companies must go through stages of life and eventually mature and fade away. Instead, those that really succeed constantly adapt, having conserved the resources to allow that to occur. You will develop new ideas about how to help your company succeed. The book also explains how and why scenario planning began, and how critical it is to being ready to adapt to the changing environment. With today's increasing volatility in business, resources and world economies, this book should be required reading.

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Summary: Offers some interesting insights
Review: Arie de Geus's premise - that there are two kinds of companies: economic companies (which exist primarily to make money) and living companies (which exist primarily to continue to exist and be all they can be) - isn't novel. The theme was well developed - perhaps more rigorously - in Collins' and Porras' Built to Last.

De Geus' contribution is therefore one of providing a human perspective, in some ways giving an idea of what it is like as a person or as a manager to work in a company which is alive. In this he succeeds.

I must admit my view was tinged a little by my experiences as a manager in the Royal Dutch/Shell group of the 90's, dealing with the consequences of massive errors in the allocation of capital, many of which happened under Mr. de Geus's watch as Planning Coordinator. Whether Shell will be able to resist the misguided pressures of its shareholders (and of highly paid consultants) and stay a living company remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, an excellent contribution, with much wisdom.

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Summary: The Organization as the Organism !
Review: Arie de Gues is known to some management students as the person whose research spurred Peter Senge to do work on the "learning Organisation". In this book Arie talks about the evolving notion of the organization as a living being, instead of just an "economic entity" whose main purpose of existence is to survive, fulfill its potential, and to become great. Plain talking and cutting free from jargon, Arie illustrates this idea with examples from his career in Royal Dutch Shell and the studies Shell had carried out on long lasting and big organizations (they found only around 40 odd !!). This book needs to read by entreprenuers, business people and academicians to look at their organizations as some thing else apart from a money making machine ! Revolutionary!!

Rating:
Summary: The Organization as the Organism !
Review: Arie de Gues is known to some management students as the person whose research spurred Peter Senge to do work on the "learning Organisation". In this book Arie talks about the evolving notion of the organization as a living being, instead of just an "economic entity" whose main purpose of existence is to survive, fulfill its potential, and to become great. Plain talking and cutting free from jargon, Arie illustrates this idea with examples from his career in Royal Dutch Shell and the studies Shell had carried out on long lasting and big organizations (they found only around 40 odd !!). This book needs to read by entreprenuers, business people and academicians to look at their organizations as some thing else apart from a money making machine ! Revolutionary!!

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Summary: From a strategic exploration viewpoint, this is a MUST book!
Review: I enjoyed reading this book very much - not only from the strategic exploration standpoint.

On top of sharing his own personal and professional experiences of applying the strategies in Royal Dutch/Shell group, the author gives an excellent explanation about our innate human ability to strategise, since our caveman days. Once you understand his explanation, you will begin to realise why scenario building is quite a piece of cake.

Neverthesless, I would strongly recommend readers to read this book in conjunction with Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View. The reason is this: this book gives you only the WHAT? and the WHY? while Peter Schwartz's gives you the WHAT? and the HOW?. Both books complement each other.

If you want to be a strategic explorer, - and also to reclaim/maximise your innate ability to build scenarios - buy & read both books!

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Summary: Excellent Management Book
Review: I found this book to be a relief and escape to the way the corporate world has evolved. By taking a look at long living companies, the author has extracted some timeless advice for corporations to pay attention to. The thing that "lowered the score," so to speak is that there were hardly any statistics or hard numbers involved to back up his claims, regardless of the intuitive excellence of their teachings. If this book is to make a difference and it has the ingredients to do so, I thought some hard results outside of the longevity would have to be produced and they weren't. What I particularly liked was how the distinction was made between living companies and economic companies. More importantly, how people need to realize that you can't run a company with some of one philosophy and some of the other. You'll have to pick this up and read it to understand this, but I think if you do, you'll see that most companies are attempting to mix oil and water today and unfortuneately, I agree that they will be "dead before their time." Overall, this was a very insightful book and upon reflection to my own life, sarcastically entertaining.

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Summary: the living book
Review: If I have to stay with only one business book in my shelf( I have more than 300 in the last count), the living company would be this book. My review will be more emotional I think. This is so, because the way this book touched me. I read it three times and some time think I have to read it again.

This is a very similar with the "Built to last", one of the bestsellers of Amazon. If you liked that book this will be an excellent complement of your reading and thoughts.

Perhaps this is the book that a Startup's CEOs should had read before launch their enterprise, because one of the characteristic of a living company is that they are conservative in their finances.

De Geus wrote a book that it is not limit to a period of time like recent books dot com books. By this I mean that you can go back to it and reapply its contents in your business reality again and again.

An import thing to say is that this is a book of principles, not rules or easy steps to success. Although the author is going to show you that there is a pattern in all the living company, he goes beyond that, showing the root that origin these patterns. The principles was constructed by observing companies, specially Royal Doutch/shell, were Arie de Geus worked for many years, but with the help of other disciplines like psychology and biology, which study the behavior and life of humans and animals. To discuss about innovation for instance, you will observe how a specie of bird is very smart to pass a learning to the whole specie. And to understand how we react or anticipate an external change in our business, it will be useful to look some psychology's theories about the human mind, and so on.

Don't think this is a book for academic public, it is not. You will find not only theories but many examples and cases of the thesis of De Geus. But it is different, I think, of the recent business book. Some times it seems so easy to look a successful company today and says "look, this is what you have to do in your company". A couple of years ago you could find many books explaining why Netscape was so great. Where are Netscape now?. It would not pass in the test of time.

So if you are only worried to make your money no matter what is going to happen to your company, this is not a book for you. Probably you are Jim Clark type. Read the new, new thing instead. But if you thing that management is more than stock options ( I said more. I am saying that is a consequence not the only objective), if you believe the every company must have a reason to exist, if you believe the people are important, than I guarantee, you gonna like this book, tell me about

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant insights to long lived companies
Review: This has become a bible in my consulting practice especially the impacts of Economic vs Stewardship models in business. This book provide tremendous insight and motivation for getting beyond the burn out many of us experience in corporate life today.

The stewardship approaches discussed and evidence supporting their viability demonstrate how any level of management can have an impact that will far out last their tenure with any firm.

One key element that could be developed, is how to utilize the stewardship model within an Economic modeled organization.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Management Book
Review: This is a must read for all those people who are interested in the subject of organizational learning. The book illustrates clearly the challenges companies face in encouraging its employees to learn. Also, it provides a lot of examples and strategies from Shell. Overall, it is an excellent for a any person, even if they are not in a managerial position in a company. If the reader is such a position, then this is a must read.