Hi Tom & the SII mailing list,

This is in reply to the email from a few weeks ago about ideas from science influencing how people run business organizations.> 2. 20th-century science -- relativity theory, quantum theory,

> modern evolutionary cosmology etc. -- has yet to cross the
> screen of "management science" or management practice (except
> for a few instances where management writers talk superficially
> about complexity or "quantum" behavior).

An interesting possibility is that Newtonian physics is an excellent approximation to say, relativistic physics. In other words, 20th century physics didn't really invalidate the previous work. Perhaps the "Newtonian" business models are also reasonable approximations, even if not perfect.

I would conjecture that in fact, even if businesses are somewhat more random than a Newtonian viewpoint might want, still, *on average* it might be reasonable to use a deterministic Newtonian-like business model. But I don't know anything about operations research or business so this is all speculation.> 3. I am concerned that businesses that follow "what they know

> about the world" in point 1 above inevitably self-destruct,
> and eventually the global business system will take with
> it much of the Earth's ecosystem that sustains human life.

This seems way overstated. For example, wrecking the ecosystem & destroying human life seems like it's definitely something that could be factored into a business analysis. Such drastic consequences I would guess are more due to people overlooking factors, rather than the wrong model. For example, if I use the Navier-Stokes equations of motion to describe fluid flow, I can describe alot about the oceans, but I will fail to describe tides unless I also include the moon in my analysis. That doesn't invalidate the Navier-Stokes equations, it just says that the ocean is not a closed system. Likewise, businesses aren't closed systems, but this doesn't invalidate a "Newtonian" way of thinking about them, it just says we need to take into account the external world.

> This consequence follows if businesses actually exist in a
> world that science now tells us is described in point 2 above.

I reiterate that 20th century science is well approximated by previous "classical" science. While I have no idea if it translates over into the business world, I don't see catastrophe as a necessary consequence of any of this.

One last point: the Newtonian type model apparently has proven successful in the business world, for example with operations research. This may be nothing more than a lucky coincidence, and thus I see no compelling reason that quantum mechanics and relativity must also be relevant.

--Eric