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Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter
Businesses around the world are facing rapidly changing economic and social situations. Business leaders and managers must be ready to respond and adapt in new, innovative ways. The authors of this groundbreaking book argue that people in business must adopt a 'holonomic' way of thinking, a dynamic and authentic understanding of the relationships within a business system, and an appreciation of the whole. Complexity and chaos are not to be feared, but rather are the foundation of successful business structures and economics. Holonomics presents a new world view where economics and ecology are in harmony. Using real-world case studies and practical exercises, the authors guide the reader in a new, holistic approach to business, towards a more sustainable future where both people and planet matter.
- GenresBusiness
192 pages, Paperback
First published May 22, 2014
4 people are currently reading
93 people want to read
About the author
Simon Robinson
96 books5 followersWith three decades of experience in customer experience design, Simon is an internet pioneer and award-winning innovator, having co-founded British Telecom’s Genie Internet, the world’s first mobile internet portal, and contributing to the design and launch of the world’s first smart phones. He is the CEO (Worldwide) of Holonomics, co-founder of the Deep Tech Network, a Harvard Business Review author, and coauthor of Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation, Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design and Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter. Simon is respected globally for his contributions to customer experience strategy and Deep Tech, having created numerous design methods and frameworks such as the New 4Ps and the Holonomic Circle.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 15, 2016
This was an intellectually challenging and dense read, but well worth the read and the endless cups of green tea in the early twilight hours to go with all that great food for thought.
April 24, 2022
Holonomics is a portmanteau of Holistic Economics. The central metaphor reminds that every part of a plant knows how to grow a whole plant; the whole is embodied in every leaf, stem, and root. And similarly, any piece of a broken hologram contains the entire original image, in miniature.
This was a challenging book for me to get through. With its long digressions (into the poet Goethe’s mathematics and plant science, among other things), wandering writing style, and gems of wisdom buried in the long riffs, I found myself picking it up, reading a few pages, putting it down for a few weeks, taking it on trips and reading 30 or 50 pages, and finally giving it a long push and finishing in December what I started in August.
But it was worth the slog because this book offers lots of those gems. Here are a few:
* For maximum results, co-create your products, services, and processes with your customers (p. 27).
Holonomic thinking combines mental, systems, and business models to see the whole picture of complex systems (p. 33, p. 37).
* Studying the thinking processes of scientists and watching their consensus shift over time provides great insight; scientists often tend to marginalize creative thinkers, but these outliers create much of the real progress once their ideas gain acceptance (p. 45).
* Be careful of ambiguous language: do you mean “normal” as in what usually happens, or “normal” as a social behavior pattern? (p. 66)
* Plants are always reinventing themselves. It’s about the becoming, the process, adapting to their changing environment (pp. 74-75).
* Gregory Bateson: Our problems result from the difference between how nature works and how people think (p. 93).
* Looking at how a species organizes itself internally can tell you a lot. Mice, in constant fear of predators, focus on their nervous systems, while bison, big enough not to fear many predators, are organized around digestion (p. 116).
* We are not the only species that can engineer our environment. Certain types of termite mounds have the equivalents of heat, air conditioning, and gardens—but only when the community reaches critical mass and gets “excited”; as individuals, termites don’t build those things (pp. 135-137).
* The new science of complexity studies has a lot to teach us about what happens when individual actions stop dominating and the community takes over—and why chaos and order (combined into “chaord” on p. 187) are both necessary (pp. 138-140); in fact, the optimum condition for adaptability is living “on the edge of chaos” (p. 142). Gaia, the entire earth, can be seen as a single giant and very complex system that self-regulates and incorporates both living and non-living elements—the more complexity, the greater stability, and the more diversity, the less chaos—but you need some chaos to avoid stagnation. Gaia has even been able to maintain appropriate temperatures for life even as the sun has gotten 25 percent brighter and despite periods of significant heating or cooling (pp. 145-150).
* Just as nature combines collaboration and competition, so does a holonomic, eco-friendly business environment, constantly amalgamating into a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts (pp. 156-165).
* Valuing the earth/ecosystem has monetary benefits, too; the earth provides $33 trillion per year in services, vastly outstripping the $18 trillion human-generated world GDP (pp. 181-182).
It’s better to buy fewer things and use them well than to buy lots of things, just to have them (p. 220).
The final 50 pages or so are full of great case studies in the business world. Companies profiled include obvious ones like Toyota, but also many we don’t necessarily think of as holonomic: VISA, Kyocera, Nextel, the Brazilian auto service shop chain DPaschoal, and many others—with interviews of many leaders from these companies. It also lists the nine factors that make up Bhutan’s National Happiness Index (p. 223), and two amazing quotes from mythicist Joseph Campbell: “All money is congealed energy” (p. 221) and “I don’t think [a meaning for life] is what we’re really seeking…what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive…” (p. 224).
Holonomics includes extensive endnotes, bibliography, and an index.
This was a challenging book for me to get through. With its long digressions (into the poet Goethe’s mathematics and plant science, among other things), wandering writing style, and gems of wisdom buried in the long riffs, I found myself picking it up, reading a few pages, putting it down for a few weeks, taking it on trips and reading 30 or 50 pages, and finally giving it a long push and finishing in December what I started in August.
But it was worth the slog because this book offers lots of those gems. Here are a few:
* For maximum results, co-create your products, services, and processes with your customers (p. 27).
Holonomic thinking combines mental, systems, and business models to see the whole picture of complex systems (p. 33, p. 37).
* Studying the thinking processes of scientists and watching their consensus shift over time provides great insight; scientists often tend to marginalize creative thinkers, but these outliers create much of the real progress once their ideas gain acceptance (p. 45).
* Be careful of ambiguous language: do you mean “normal” as in what usually happens, or “normal” as a social behavior pattern? (p. 66)
* Plants are always reinventing themselves. It’s about the becoming, the process, adapting to their changing environment (pp. 74-75).
* Gregory Bateson: Our problems result from the difference between how nature works and how people think (p. 93).
* Looking at how a species organizes itself internally can tell you a lot. Mice, in constant fear of predators, focus on their nervous systems, while bison, big enough not to fear many predators, are organized around digestion (p. 116).
* We are not the only species that can engineer our environment. Certain types of termite mounds have the equivalents of heat, air conditioning, and gardens—but only when the community reaches critical mass and gets “excited”; as individuals, termites don’t build those things (pp. 135-137).
* The new science of complexity studies has a lot to teach us about what happens when individual actions stop dominating and the community takes over—and why chaos and order (combined into “chaord” on p. 187) are both necessary (pp. 138-140); in fact, the optimum condition for adaptability is living “on the edge of chaos” (p. 142). Gaia, the entire earth, can be seen as a single giant and very complex system that self-regulates and incorporates both living and non-living elements—the more complexity, the greater stability, and the more diversity, the less chaos—but you need some chaos to avoid stagnation. Gaia has even been able to maintain appropriate temperatures for life even as the sun has gotten 25 percent brighter and despite periods of significant heating or cooling (pp. 145-150).
* Just as nature combines collaboration and competition, so does a holonomic, eco-friendly business environment, constantly amalgamating into a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts (pp. 156-165).
* Valuing the earth/ecosystem has monetary benefits, too; the earth provides $33 trillion per year in services, vastly outstripping the $18 trillion human-generated world GDP (pp. 181-182).
It’s better to buy fewer things and use them well than to buy lots of things, just to have them (p. 220).
The final 50 pages or so are full of great case studies in the business world. Companies profiled include obvious ones like Toyota, but also many we don’t necessarily think of as holonomic: VISA, Kyocera, Nextel, the Brazilian auto service shop chain DPaschoal, and many others—with interviews of many leaders from these companies. It also lists the nine factors that make up Bhutan’s National Happiness Index (p. 223), and two amazing quotes from mythicist Joseph Campbell: “All money is congealed energy” (p. 221) and “I don’t think [a meaning for life] is what we’re really seeking…what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive…” (p. 224).
Holonomics includes extensive endnotes, bibliography, and an index.
February 10, 2022
This was one of the most important books in my life. To grasp the author's ideas has amplified my understanding on how to do business.
After reading this book, our enterprise began a deep journey into the transformation of the entire company strategy and much of what is in the book has become the strategic guidelines to guide the future of our company.
Thank you Simon and Maria for dedicating a lifetime to helping organizations prepare for a much more prosperous future for all.
After reading this book, our enterprise began a deep journey into the transformation of the entire company strategy and much of what is in the book has become the strategic guidelines to guide the future of our company.
Thank you Simon and Maria for dedicating a lifetime to helping organizations prepare for a much more prosperous future for all.
August 21, 2016
Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter by Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson is a book which places business within the overall ecosystem of the biosphere. Holonomics is a combination of ‘holos' (the whole) and economics. The authors highlight the limitations and traps within the current ways of thinking in business.
The book is divided into three parts:
Part One introduces the phenomenological way of encountering wholeness in systems, which is a dynamic way of seeing. Experiencing the coming-into-being of phenomena makes it possible to reach a deeper understanding of the world. The authors call this holonomic thinking. Holonomic thinking doesn't replace mechanistic thinking, which focuses on objects, or systems thinking, where the dynamic coming-into-being often is lost, but expands our thinking.
Part Two covers systems theory and complexity science. One of the key insights from Part Two is how the dynamic way of seeing transforms the observer from within through the genuine encounter with the phenomena that are studied. Holonomic thinking enables a person to reach a deeper understanding of the world where business is no longer seen as separate from people and nature.
Part Three presents a number of case studies of holonomic thinking as applied to business. Holonomic thinking is relevant to businesses since they are living systems. Among the examples mentioned are: Visa Inc.'s Chaordic Organization, where governance and power is distributed; Kyocera's Amoeba Management System, which is based on self-managed and self-coordinated cells; Gore Associates' Lattice Organization, where teams emerge naturally around perceived opportunities; Toyota's Production System, in which the information that directs operations is the work itself; and DPaschoal's Business Ecosystem, where all parts belong together and sustain each other.
A key insight from the book is that our thinking is an intimate part of our seeing, and vice versa. This means that entering into a new way of seeing expands our thinking. This book is important since it invites us into a new way of seeing which greatly expands our world view. This is much needed since people and planet matter. I warmly recommend the book!
The book is divided into three parts:
Part One introduces the phenomenological way of encountering wholeness in systems, which is a dynamic way of seeing. Experiencing the coming-into-being of phenomena makes it possible to reach a deeper understanding of the world. The authors call this holonomic thinking. Holonomic thinking doesn't replace mechanistic thinking, which focuses on objects, or systems thinking, where the dynamic coming-into-being often is lost, but expands our thinking.
Part Two covers systems theory and complexity science. One of the key insights from Part Two is how the dynamic way of seeing transforms the observer from within through the genuine encounter with the phenomena that are studied. Holonomic thinking enables a person to reach a deeper understanding of the world where business is no longer seen as separate from people and nature.
Part Three presents a number of case studies of holonomic thinking as applied to business. Holonomic thinking is relevant to businesses since they are living systems. Among the examples mentioned are: Visa Inc.'s Chaordic Organization, where governance and power is distributed; Kyocera's Amoeba Management System, which is based on self-managed and self-coordinated cells; Gore Associates' Lattice Organization, where teams emerge naturally around perceived opportunities; Toyota's Production System, in which the information that directs operations is the work itself; and DPaschoal's Business Ecosystem, where all parts belong together and sustain each other.
A key insight from the book is that our thinking is an intimate part of our seeing, and vice versa. This means that entering into a new way of seeing expands our thinking. This book is important since it invites us into a new way of seeing which greatly expands our world view. This is much needed since people and planet matter. I warmly recommend the book!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews