Gurus

/ 01 July 2009

Richard Pascale

Richard Pascale
1938 – present
American

‘If it ain’t broke, break it’

Richard Pascale worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company in the late 1970s alongside Tom Peters at a time when Americans thought they were being overwhelmed by Japan’s industrial superiority.

Peters and Pascale looked at the issue from different sides of the same coin and each wrote a huge bestseller which became the basis for their subsequent careers – in Pascale’s case, as an academic and consultant (to companies such as BP, Intel and GE).

Peters exhorted Americans not to despair because they still had some excellent companies and to learn from the Japanese companies that were doing better than them. In his 1981 book, The Art of Japanese Management, he compared the Japanese company Matsushita with the American company ITT, greatly to the credit of the former. But it was in the softer sides of management rather than in such things as strategy and structure that Pascale concluded that the Japanese excelled.

Pascale became even better known for another Japanese company that he looked at closely, where he uncovered what is now known as the ‘Honda Effect’. ‘Organisational agility’, he decided, was the key to Honda’s success, and much of his writing since has addressed this idea of agility. Honda, he said, exists ‘in a sort of restless, uneasy state, which enables it to get a great deal out of its people and itself as an entity’.

After spending 20 years on the faculty of Stanford’s graduate school of business, Pascale moved to Oxford University’s Saïd Business School as an associate fellow. His later work has focused on the idea of complexity, drawing parallels between large organisations and complex scientific systems.

He has focused on four commonalities in particular: that prolonged equilibrium in any type of system heralds death; that innovation occurs close to the edge of chaos; that all living things have a capacity for self-organisation; and that when you tamper with living things, you face unintended consequences.

It is perhaps the first idea that has attracted most attention at a time when corporate change has been accelerating sharply.

Taken and abridged from The Economist Guide to Management ideas and Gurus by Tim Hindle, published by The Economist. To buy a copy for the special price of £18 (usually £20) including P&P (UK only), call Profile Books on 0207 841 6000 during office hours, quoting ‘Edge magazine reader offer’