Roderic:
My reaction is that the whole of a business system is more than it parts,
too. While this is obvious in discussions such as this, it is not
necessarily a conscious part of everyday business thinking. Perhaps
holism is too new an applied concept to be of demonstrable value yet.
Does holism with its "greater than the sum" have any implications for or
connections to chaos? When parts come together in an organization, do
their interactions create not only foreseeable, but also unforeseeable
results and consequences?
500 employees come to work at company ABC with the best of intentions.
When they interact in performing tasks to meet a specification, things
happen...product and service is an outcome, but along with these come a
raft of problems. Does holism recognize this feature of organizational
behavior?
Holism expresses a theory about structure which has implications on
process. What is true about holism for "whole people" catalog readers and
granola eaters (I am one) may also be true for business organisms. The
whole is greater than the sum. There exists other explicit and implicit
"things" or energies or actions or djinns beyond the sum of the parts.
Which reminds me of something I heard.
When asked to create an analog for their organizations, Japanese
rank-and-file likened them to organisms. Their American counterparts used
machines.
-- Barry Mallis Totla Quality Resource Manager MARKEM Corp. Keene, NH bmallis@markem.com