What I’m Reading | ‘Master of Change’

I really enjoyed reading Brad Stulberg’s new book ‘Master of Change - How to excel when everything is changing’. It’s a carefully researched, wide-ranging guide to how embrace change and uncertainty.

One of my favourite parts looks into the concept of Population Ecology of Organisations, or Organisational Ecology. Population Ecology looks at specific industries and examines the births and deaths of organisations over long periods of time. 

Research repeatedly found that when a specific field’s operating environment changes, certain organisations get selected out and replaced, either by their current competitors or by new ones that are better suited to the external demands.

The 3 core principles could be summarised like this:

  1. The more rigid an organisation’s structure, the more likely that organisation is to get selected out during periods of disorder. 

  2. An organisation’s strength in the short run all too easily becomes its weakness in the long run; if an organisation is too calcified around certain attributes or goals, when the environment changes those very attributes or goals often get in the way.

  3. The bigger the external change, the more likely it is that all the entrenched organisations in an industry either become extinct or change so much that they are hardly recognisable. In other words, organisations are like individuals: they struggle to maintain their identities during periods of change and disorder. Some don’t change enough. Others change so much that they completely lose sight of what they are. Only organizations that deliberately cultivate their rugged boundaries and then flexibly apply them have a shot at prospering over the long haul. 

Previous
Previous

Algorithmic Attention Rent

Next
Next

Why Web3 (still) matters