Synopsis
Excerpt
At the outset, I must stipulate that contradictions to some things I have set forth in this work may be found in my previous writings, and that I recognize the paradox in relying on history to question the use of it for didactic or prognosticative purposes, at least. Also, in deference to my wife, Penny, who read the manuscript carefully, I concede that I have tended to make heavy use of a fractal mode in relying on strings of nouns and adjectives. As for the conceptual roots of the work, I can only say that many elements fitted into this study came into view long before I knew of the field of chaos-complexity-nonlinearity-ergodics. From the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, my experiences in the army and in business, and the reading of military history raised my awareness of ambiguity and imprecision in historical description and military operations. My service as a military police officer offered special perspectives on the varieties of human behavior, the deficiencies of memory-based testimony, the general tendency in complex organizations to oversimplification, and the prevalence of gaps between rational-linear models and reality.
From 1965 to 1974, further horizons were opened to me at the Center for Advanced Study in Organization, under the mentorship and tutelage of Bernard James, and the many ad hoc faculty in CASOS's various institutes and seminars. There, aside from my administrative duties, under the guidance of Frank Steggert, my task was to develop cases from military history to illustrate principles and effects in phase with the conceptual "three-legged stool" on which CASOS seminars were built: General Systems Theory, organization thought, and creativity. Sailing many figurative seas and entering many strange ports as my . . .