文档介绍：STRATEGY
Strategy at the
edge of c HAos
“Fishbowl” economics once provided the
basis of corporate strategy. No more
New theories show markets are
“complex adaptive systems”
Making pany an evolver
Are we more than blind players in an
evolutionary business game?
Eric D. Beinhocker
24 THE McKINSEY QUARTERLY 1997 NUMBER 1
HE ECONOMIST PAUL KRUGMAN SAYS that there are three types of
economics. There are up-and-down economics (“stocks were up and
Tunemployment was down today”), airport-bookstore economics (Ten
Easy Steps to Avoid Global Depression), and Greek-letter economics. Greek-
letter economics is the mathematical variety practised in universities and
published in academic journals. And it is in serious trouble.
Historically, Greek-letter economics has rewarded mathematical pyrotechnics
over fidelity to the real world. The core theories it has produced over the last
few decades, such as rational expectations and general equilibrium, are
mathematically elegant, but lacking in empirical validity. Joseph Stiglitz,
chairman of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisors, recently
observed, “Anybody looking at these models would say they can’t provide a
good description of the modern world.”*
The dismal state of the dismal science matters to managers, CEOs,
consultants, and business professors because much of modern thinking in
management is built on a foundation of Greek-letter economics. The bad
news is that this foundation is now in serious doubt; the good news is that a
radically new one is starting to be put in place. Though the term paradigm
shiƒt is overused, the changes currently taking shape in economics justify the
use of the phrase Thomas Kuhn coined to describe how scientific fields enter
a state of crisis and then move to pletely new way of thinking, as with
the shiƒt from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics.
The new approach to economics has important implications for management,
and in particular for strategy aniz