Life Cycle
(28 July 1997)

At a recent meeting, I was reminded of the changing reality of the life cycle of business organizations.

Think of companies as aggregates of projects, not single entities. John Kao flirts with this idea in “Jamming.” Peter Drucker talks about separate projects, each with its own life cycle. He suggests businesses will develop characteristics of movie production . . . a temporary melding of skilled people who do one thing and then break up . . . in contrast to the old movie studio system. Organizational studies growing out of evolution and adaptive systems view projects as synonymous with “agents.”

To study the topic in greater detail, Ichak Adizes’s “The Pursuit of Prime” uses much of the vocabulary and concepts describing this emerging life cycle.

- Dean Lebaron