Managing by the Moments working paper, draft, 110698 Alpheus Bingham, PhD Vice President, Eli Lilly and Company
Notes:
Recent years have seen a growing number of attempts to tackle the problems and behaviors associated with large systems. These efforts range from global ecology to weather to the emergence of life. They include some rudimentary attempts to apply chaos and complexity theory to human systems such as cultures, economies and business organizations. What all these varied problems have in common is that they consist of many parts, presumably with independent behaviors but behaviors which are interdependent in complex ways not given to purely reductionist analysis.
The literature often tantalizes us with glimpses of the way in which complextity theory may play a part in helping managers to sharpen their perfromance and improve on results. But, beyond a useful metaphor, they offer only limited tools for diagnosis and understanding.
I will link these management applications to modeling for two simple reasons, first, because it will often be easier to consult the model for information that may be poorly tractable from the real system and because by doing so, I hope to emphasize the role that both wholistic modeling and reductionist tools like statistical moments play in our attempt to understand and influence real systems.