198 Leading with NLP
up or on the way down. The moment you have reached a
peak, you start to slip down the other side. Business contin-
ually seeks different peaks to climb. The dangers are that
what seems like a peak is a foothill, or, worse, that all the
competitors are climbing a different mountain range. Excel-
lence is not enough; it is too static a concept. The hot
companies of today can turn into the cold turkeys of tomor-
row.
In Search of Excellenceby Peters and Waterman^3 was the
business bestseller of 1982. It told the stories of the most suc-
cessful businesses of the time. However, it modelled the
excellent businesses of the late 1970s. They were not neces-
sarily adapted to the 1980s. Three years after the book was
published only a minority of those excellent businesses was
still excellent by the same criteria. In the 1990s the focus is
on change, the response is innovation and the prize is sus-
tainability. The new business bestseller could be called ‘In
Search of Sustainability’.
the edge of chaos
The place of balance between the Scylla of too much free-
dom and the Charybdis of too much order is known in
complexity theory as the edge of chaos. Here there is
enough freedom to continually evolve and change, and
enough structure to stay stable and function well. The sta-
bility and order give the business continuity, efficiency,
planning and some degree of control. The freedom means
there is room for creativity, variety, risk taking, experimenta-
tion and entrepreneurship. The edge of chaos is where an
organization can learn.
Much of the time we tiptoe up to this edge, take one look
into the teeming depths below and draw back sharply in
favour of habit, comfort and conformity. Yet this is the best
place to be. An organization needs to be able to meet and
adapt to the changing environment, and the more the envi-
ronment changes, the more flexible the organization needs