Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics and Ecology, Revised Edition

The Management of Change: Adapting to the Environment

The establishment of any business is not a once-and-for-all operation. Continuing adaptation to change is essential, especially in the fast-moving environment in which business is conducted today. As a result, continuing programs of experimentation and adaptation form a critical part of any organizational development. Such uninhibited experimentation is more often the prerogative of youth than of age.

Yet experiment, problem-solving, and the generation and selection of alternatives remained as important for Demetrius Comino in his sixties as it had been in his youth. If anything he caused damage to his company in the 1970s by continuing to challenge, to diversify, and to probe when Dexion should have been consolidating, focusing, and directing its powerfully constituted energies.

PACRA

Progress arises in science, as in evolution, from the increasing weeding out of error. Thus truth, in scientific terms, is not approached as one would seek a goal, by heading straight toward a distant beacon, visible or visualized. The individual scientist may proceed that way, but as for science as a whole, what it regards as truth is but the strip of possibilities left over after all demonstrable errors have been trimmed away. And this will remain a fairly broad band of uncertainty, including the indeterminate, the unknown, and the indeterminable.

In the process of natural selection or evolution, and in the development of science, two clear ...