What is a business? How can (or should) an expert business practitioner relay his or her knowledge to another interested party? Trying to understand these questions leads down a path of debating the merits and demerits of understanding through metaphors, and understanding through models. This eventually ends up with a discussion of roots in philosophy of science.
During the Seiad project in 1977, Ian Simmonds and I had many discussions about understanding business, filling up the whiteboard in his office at the Watson Research Center.1 My studies into business strategy reflected the two primary foundations: microeconomics — Michael Porter is a leading proponent of this approach — and organization theory — with roots in the research of the Tavistock Institute, and the sociotechnical systems thinking from Fred Emery and Eric Trist. Add onto that my personal bent towards decision support systems — Peter Keen‘s research while at CISR at the Sloan School at MIT was highly influential — and a strategic view of marketing that can be described as Market-Driven Strategy, as described by George Day. These all represent models of business.
Ian — as I recall, starting from a side discussion with Doug McDavid — brought up an alternative approach to businesses, with the book: Images of Organization, by Gareth Morgan. I had a visceral response to this work, because it prescribed the use of metaphors to describe business. The problem that I’ve found with metaphors is that they relay an initial — and possibly superficial — portrayal of business.… Read more (in a new tab)
