Dissipative enterprises, chaos, and the principles of lean organizations

This paper proposes that ‘lean’ organizations, which many observers believe constitute an entirely new ‘paradigm’ of management and organization, are successful because their fundamental structure embodies many of the characteristics of ‘self-organizing’ dynamic systems, such as ‘dissipative structures’, which balance ‘chaos’ with ‘order’. It employs concepts from modern information theory, cybernetics, and the comparatively new field of self-organizing systems. These concepts suggest that lean organizations are extremely flexible and highly adaptable to rapidly changing competitive conditions, and are characterized by continual reorganization, rapid new product development, and constant search for increased efficiency, all of which are the results of self-organizational processes.