Lest anyone feel overwhelmed by complexity, however, I’d
like to offer this thought from Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden:
We can imagine a universe in which the laws of nature are im-
mensely more complex. But we do not live in such a universe.
Why not? I think it may be because all those organisms who per-
ceived their universe as very complex are dead. Those of our ar-
boreal ancestors who had difficulty computing their trajectories
as they brachiated from tree to tree did not leave many offspring.The universe may not be very complex, but it is, neverthe-
less, complex. And as I mentioned earlier, the social laws are
more complex and less certain than the natural ones. But de-
spite the complexity, we cannot stand still. We must continue
to swing from tree to tree, although the trees may be ideas, and
we may be using axons instead of arms to make the connec-
tions. We might want to take Alfred North Whitehead’s advice
here: “Seek simplicity, then distrust it.”
It was the mechanistic view that produced the organiza-
tion man, and it was the organization man, as I have noted,
who ironically enough has caused many of the problems in
our organizations. It is the individual, operating at the peak
of his or her creative and moral powers, who will revive our
organizations, by reinventing both self and them.
Recent research has made it clear that the geography of the
brain is not as strictly delineated as we once thought. But it is
still useful to think of American organizational life as a left-
brain culture, meaning logical, analytical, technical, controlled,
conservative, and administrative. We, to the extent we are its
products, are dominated and shaped by those same characteris-
tics. Our culture needs more right-brain qualities, needs to be
On Becoming a Leader