Arie de Geus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arie de Geus was born in Rotterdam in 1930. He joined Royal Dutch/Shell in 1951 and remained there until his retirement in 1989. Since he retired he has been a visiting fellow of London Business School and has worked with MIT's Centre for Organisational Learning.
With a wealth of experience gained as a top level corporate strategist, Mr. de Geus has earned a reputation as an excellent speaker with great insight into management planning and organisational learning.
Books and articles by Arie De Geus
Book "The Living Company" Nicholas Brealy, London (1997)
In this book De Geus compares companies to living organisms and relates their ability to learn with the extent to which they are integrated into their environment and also to their longevity and long term survival.
Article "The Living Company," (Harvard Business Review, 1997); winner of the McKinsey Award
Lecture, "Companies: What Are They?" (Royal Society of Arts, 1995)
Article "Planning as Learning" Harvard Business Review (1988)
Thought provoking Ideas
De Geus in a recent lecture for RSM alumni in London suggested that somewhere along the evolution path between animals and humans, man acquired the ability for permanent storage and retrieval of his experiences of ‘escaping attack’ or ‘foraging for food’ in such a way that during his periods of inactivity (rest or sleep), the human brain would continue to process these images over and over again but always using slightly different scenarios evaluating the success of different possible outcomes. So imagine if you will a caveman having survived a confrontation with a Saber Tiger and having dreamt and re-dreamt his lucky escape in hundreds of different circumstances. The next time Cave Man meets Saber Tiger, he instinctively knows what to do, because he has evaluated over and over again in his dreams that the best thing to do if he is near a tree, is to climb in it or If there is no tree nearby to run like hell. Now picture the alternative of an image of rabbit frozen in a car’s head lights and you see what a tremendous evolutionary advantage this ability for contingency planning gave to the human race.
According to De Geus, Swedish Research of MRIscans of the human brain while dreaming provided real evidence that such repeating brain patterns are indeed happening when we are dreaming. Organisations can acquire the same evolutionary behaviour, increasing their chances for survival in a constantly changing competitive environment. Only now we call it Strategic Planning.
