by Derek Morrison, 8 April 2010
Clay Shirky’s online essay The Collapse of Complex Business Models (1 April 2010) should perhaps give all leaders of all types of organisation serious pause for thought. The key message of Shirky’s piece appears to be that leaderships and elites are comforted by organisational and bureaucratic complexity but that this also creates the conditions for inflexiblity and inability to adapt to change and, therefore, ultimately leads to failure of even previously successful societies and organisations. Shirky comments: In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one … when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” Whether we agree or not with Shirky’s premiss it’s a thoughtful piece and well worth a read.
As well as being adjunct Professor at New York University, Clay Shirky is an established author, commentator and broadcaster on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies.
