The Complexity Advantage provides business readers with a new, practical, and effective method of business leadership. The increased competition which all business leaders and managers feel today is the result of an increasingly connected and rapidly changing global marketplace. Unfortunately even the most intelligent and well-intended responses to this competitive pressure and the uncertainty arising from rapid change are shaped by an outdated world view. Typically this response–based in linear, Newtonian thinking–makes things worse.

On the other hand, The Complexity Advantage leadership method is effective because we constructed it using the leading-edge scientific discoveries generated by Complexity, Chaos, Cybernetic, and Evolutionary Theory combined with our more than sixty years of experience in a wide variety of businesses, ranging from multinational corporations to Internet startups. Some of the book arises from the authors' work at Citibank which provided, in effect, a global laboratory subject to all the pressures and changes experienced by most businesses.

In the first few chapters, we provide a concise summary of Chaos, Complexity, self organizing systems, feedback loops, and the latest in evolutionary theories and competitive landscapes–explaining how and why these theories can be used to make business strategies more effective.

How do business leaders and employees at all levels enable businesses not just to survive but to thrive? Our recommendations are derived from the world's four-billion year track of self organizing evolution. There are three stages:

• In stage one, businesses take the steps necessary to remove the vicious cycles resulting from outmoded command and control leadership styles. Then they are able to commit to the Four Simple Rules we provide for developing an environment in which functional co-evolution can take place.
• In stage two, businesses use the Fourteen Steps for success to work their way up The Complexity Advantage Evolutionary Fitness Model–ultimately developing an emergent organization which can sustain itself in a variety of fitness landscapes. Simultaneously, specialized teams within the business also make use of appropriate functional evolutionary models such as the SEI Software Development Capability Maturity Model.
• In stage three, after the business is positioned to learn and move quickly, we recommend that leaders and eco-technicians use their knowledge of principles arising from Complexity science to develop models for better understanding, predicting, and influencing their external environments in such areas as the global economy, specific markets, and customer behavior.

The Complexity Advantage is not just important, it is critical to any leader or manager whose company competes in the complex and rapidly changing global marketplace. Those who understand and work in Complexity-based paradigms will leave their competition behind–not only reaching a succession of fitness peaks but also creating avalanches of change which those still following the old linear rules will not be able to handle successfully.

Don't be fooled by the adjective "global." Communications and travel technologies place all companies in the global marketplace. Even our local pizza parlor has installed a fax machine and is designing a web site. They must compete not only with the deli down the street but also with the global fast food chains. Without The Complexity Advantage, they are dinosaurs…and we all know what happened to the dinosaurs.