It is a great honor for me that you have taken your time to familiarize yourselves with my book. David is perfectly right, there is a systems perspective behind the book. I started my career as a Cobol programmer in the 1970s, and e.g. The Systems Approach by C. West Churchman has had great influence on my thinking.

What the book tries to describe is the challenge of balancing efficiency and creativity. Most organizations are quite good at efficiency. However, in the fight for continuous innovation we need more creativity (see for example the Business Week, 11 June 2007, story about 3M). Here I think the notion of orchestration is a useful metafor. When orchestrating leaders are not totally in control, but they still can influence.

A topic that now intrigues me is capabilities as properties of networks, or value constellations. Especially how to configure innovation capabilities in a network. The Toyota Aisin Seiki case (pp 60-63 in the book) is here interesting; especially what was the role of the systems architecture, and the centralized crisis management, and what was the impact of more sponteneaous self-organized behavior.

The architectural perspective of a network, considering the role of operational processes, information flows, and social ties is a truly interesting systems issue!

Thanks David for initiating this discussion!

- Johan

PS. I also enjoyed the discussions at Berkeley very much, and look forward to seeing you at some other conference soon!

Excellent. I’d also like to recommend Johan Wallin’s book — I fond the Robinon Cursoe Economics example at the stat of the book, a wonderfully simple example of how economies might be born, for pedagogical purposes that is, as value co-creation systems with more and more stakeholders being added to the mix.

Also, recommend your readers get a copy of Richard Normann’s Reframing Business: When the Map Changes the Landscape — what he calls value creating systems, we call service-systems.

The terms offering and value proposition are interestingly similar. That should be explored and taken apart some.

Thanks for a great blog/essay!

-Jim

p.s. I’m glad Johan attended the Berkeley event, since I got to meet him for the first time as well. Very glad I ordered his book and read it! This is definitely some of the good stuff for systems thinkers, interested in people, businesses, and government agencies, all as interacting service-systems or value co-creation systems.