Explore persistent business challenges & opportunities

Summary

Introduction

• Key employees not knowing a new businesses target customers is depressingly typical. 
  
• Modeling the abstract design of a tool chain or business as a CAS highlights strategic patterns and helps evaluate alternative organizational design choices. 
• Computer based agents can help develop effective models of complex systems:
  
• The potential of
  This web page reviews opportunities to enhance computing theory and practice by using biological mechanisms and complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  biologically inspired computing. 
• Models of
  This web page reviews opportunities to benefit from modeling agent based flows using complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  agent-based flows. 
• The utilization of
  This web page reviews opportunities to find and capture new niches, based on studying fitness landscapes using complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  CAS SuperOrganisms are able to capture rich niches.  A variety of CAS are included: chess, prokaryotes, nation states, businesses, economies; along with change mechanisms: evolution and artificial intelligence; agency effects and environmental impacts. 
  
  Genetic algorithms supported by fitness functions are compared to genetic operators. 
  
  Early evolution of life and its inbuilt constraints are discussed. 
  
  Strategic clustering, goals, flexibility and representation of state are considered. 
  
  fitness landscapes. 
• The importance of adaptive behavior. 
• The development of
  This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.'  It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents.  It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form.  A proposal that does not conform is wrong. 
  
  John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
  
  consistent definitions of CAS theory helps with effectively modeling CAS.  Otherwise, suitcase words have multiple attached meanings which encourage us to think in different ways about the word.  Suitcase words are reviewed by Marvin Minsky. 
  , confuse the analysis and can undermine the valuations of CAS theory.  Consulting with, and franchising of, the memetic web of definitions should support investigators and analysts studying real-world systems such as the US is the United States of America.  
  The structure and problems of the US health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  The network:
  

  • Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the conflict between two opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net or low tax without.  The emergence of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the network.  
  • The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous levels of: salt, sugar, cigarettes, guns, light, cell phones, opioids, costly education, global travel, antibacterials, formula, foods including endocrine disrupters;
    
  • Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress, amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of walking, microbiome collapse;
  • Globalization connects disparate environments in a network.  At the edges, humans are drastically altering the biosphere.  That is reducing the proximate natural environment's connectedness, and leaving its end-nodes disconnected and far less diverse.  This disconnects predators from their prey, often resulting in local booms and busts that transform the local parasite network and their reservoir and amplifier hosts.  The situation is setup so that man is introduced to spillover from the local parasites' hosts.  Occasionally, but increasingly, the spillover results in humanity becoming broadly infected.  The evolved specialization of the immune system to the proximate environment during development becomes undermined as the environment transforms. 
    
  • Is incented to focus on localized competition generating massive & costly duplication of services within physician based health care operations instead of proven public health strategies.  This process drives increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope for each new technological breakthrough. 
    
  • Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation and indirection of service development, provision, reimbursement and payment. 
    
  • Is impacted by the different political strategies for managing the increasing cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees.  
  • Is presented with acute and chronic problems to respond to.  As currently setup the network is tuned to handle acute problems.  The interactions with patients tend to be transactional. 
    
  • Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure which is:
  • Costly and inefficient
  • Structured around yearly contracts which undermine long-term health goals and strategies.  
  • Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has entrenched commercial EHR products deep within the hospital systems.  
  • Is maintained, and kept in alignment, by massive network effects across the:
  • Hospital platform based sub-networks connecting to
    
  • Physician networks
  • Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA narrow network legislation
    
  • Hospital clinical supply and food production networks
    
  • Medical school and academic research network and NIH
    
  • Global transportation network 
  • Public health networks 
  • Health care IT supply network
    
  health care CAS.  Entrenched approaches to the analysis of complexity, M. Mitchell Waldrop describes a vision of complexity via:
  
  • Rich interactions that allow a system to undergo spontaneous self-organization and, for CAS, evolution
    
  • Systems that are adaptive
    
  • More predictability than chaotic systems by bringing order and chaos into
    
  • Balance at the edge of chaos
  typically use hierarchy and abstraction to limit a 'looming
  Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and manage.  He provides examples of how this feature of these systems can have disastrous consequences for their human managers.  Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental strategic toolkit.  To prepare to more effectively manage CAS, Dorner recommends use of:
  

  • Effective iterative planning and
    
  • Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he reviews.   
  complexity catastrophe' since once that occurs, it is argued (
  Grady Booch advocates an object oriented approach to computer software design. 
  
  Booch,
  Using John Holland's theory of adaptation in complex systems Baldwin and Clark propose an evolutionary theory of design.  They show how this can limit the interdependencies that generate complexity within systems.  They do this through a focus on modularity. 
  
  Baldwin & Clark) that, no human has the intellect to comprehend the total system.  However, CAS theory shows that evolution does not require design or hierarchy and assuming their presence can lead to confusion.  Worse, reviews have repeatedly seen useful CAS models replaced by simplistic alternatives that helped the promoters of the simple models to capture grants, power and strategic direction.  Leveraging CAS definitions analysis can concentrate on inherent uncertainties is when a factor is hard to measure because it is dependent on many interconnected agents and may be affected by infrastructure and evolved amplifiers.  This is different from risk, although the two are deliberately conflated by ERISA.  Keynes argued that most aspects of the future are uncertain, at best represented by ordinal probabilities, and often only by capricious hope for future innovation, fear inducing expectations of limited confidence, which evolutionary psychology implies is based on the demands of our hunter gatherer past.  Deacon notes reduced uncertainty equates to information. 
  to CAS of:
• Constraints of phenotypic alignment,
  
• Parasitism is a long term relationship between the parasite and its host where the resources of the host are utilized by the parasite without reciprocity.  Often parasites include schematic adaptations allowing the parasite to use the hosts modeling and control systems to divert resources to them or improve their chance of reproduction: Toxoplasma gondii.  ,
  
• Viruses is a relatively small capsule containing genetic material: RNA, DNA; which utilizes the cellular infrastructure of its target host to replicate its genetic material and operational proteins.  David Quammen explains the four key challenges of viruses: Getting from one host to another, penetrating a cell within the host, commandeering the cell's infrastructure, escaping from the cell and organism; Single-stranded RNA viruses: Coronavirus, chickungunya, dengue, Ebola, Hantas, Hendra, Influenzas, Junin, Lassa, Machupo, Marburg, Measles, Mumps, Nipah, Rabies, Retrovirus (HIV), Rhinovirus, yellow fever; are subject to more mutation events than DNA viruses, but limits the size of the genetic string.  Double stranded DNA viruses: baculoviruses, hepadnaviruses, Herpesviruses, iridoviruses, papillomavirses, poxviruses; can leverage relatively far larger genetic payloads.  The relationship with the reservoir host is long-term, a parasitic or symbiotic relationship, developing over millions of years.  But opportunistically, it may spillover into a secondary host, with the virus entering the host cell, leveraging the host infrastructure to replicate its self massively and then exiting the host cell by rupturing it and killing the organism. 
  ,
  
• Disintermediation is the shift of operations from one network provider to another lower cost connected network provider.  The first network provider leverages the cost benefits of the shift to increase its profitability but becomes disrupted.  The lower cost network provider gains revenue flows, expertise and increases its active agents.  Over time this disruptive shift will leave the higher cost network as a highly profitable shell, but the agents that performed the operations that migrated to the low cost network will be ejected from the network.  For a company that may imply the costs of layoffs.  For a state the ejected workers imply increased cost impacts and reduced revenue potential which the state are trading off for improved operating efficiency. 
  . 
  
• This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent. 
  
  Phenotypic alignment acts on all
  The complex adaptive system (CAS) nature of a value delivery system is first introduced.  It's a network of agents acting as relays. 
  
  The critical nature of hub agents and the difficulty of altering an aligned network is reviewed. 
  
  The nature of and exceptional opportunities created by platforms are discussed. 
  
  Finally an example of aligning a VDS is presented. 
  
  value delivery systems. 
  
• It is often experienced as a business's competitors partnering with other of the enterprise businesses. 
  
• Succeeding emergent businesses benefit from aligned value delivery systems, but within enterprises they can appear as inefficient and presenting conflicting messages and products to customers. Executive business architects act to improve efficiency and align messages. 
  
• HP's reorganization to share channels to enterprise customers quickly undermined the grafted businesses existing value delivery systems accelerating the businesses demise.  
• Startup businesses within enterprises are often instructed to align with the current stars.  But the center of the market for a startup is often in conflict with this goal.  Only a broadly accepted enterprise strategy to promote startups and their value chain optimizations will allow the startup to compete in its market effectively, and this will depend on the enterprise stars'
  Agents use sensors to detect events in their environment.  This page reviews how these events become signals associated with beneficial responses in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  CAS signals emerge from the Darwinian information model.  Signals can indicate decision summaries and level of uncertainty. 
  
  signals and actions not repelling the other agents the startup must attract. 
  
• Bottom feeding businesses experience conflict when they attempt to access rich resources more aligned with market leaders. 
  
• Marconi, 1st Marquis of Marconi, was an Italian inventor, entrepreneur and electrical engineer.  He created components of his innovative radio telegraph which achieved long-distance radio transmission, for which he shared a Nobel Prize in Physics.  He founded The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company (Marconi) in the UK in 1897.  Guglielmo was born on 25 April 1874, the second son of wealthy Italian aristocrat, Giuseppe Marconi and Annie Jameson the granddaughter of Jameson & Sons whiskey distillers founder, of County Wexford in Ireland.  Guglielmo had no formal education, being tutored at home.  A key influence was Professor Vincenzo Rosa who taught 17 year old Marconi the basics of physical phenomena and the theory of electricity.  Marconi was keenly interested and focused on the idea of wireless telegraphy.  At 18 Guglielmo became acquainted with physicist Augusto Righi who had been a researcher with Heinrich Hertz.  Righi allowed Marconi to attend lectures at the University of Bologna and use the library and laboratory.  Marconi focused on the application of radio waves to wireless signalling.  Starting from Hertz's experimental setup Marconi built his own equipment in the attic of his home.  At Righi's suggestion he added a coherer.  He iteratively enhanced the setup adding: oscillator, monopole antenna, wire suspended aerial, telegraph key, portable transmitters, and receivers.  He grounded the transmitter and receiver and raised the height of the antenna to support signalling across two miles including over hills.  Having tried to obtain funding in Italy he moved to England, where the Post Office, Admiralty and Investors supported commercial development with products transmitting over hundreds of miles.  Marconi's UK company enabled the development of the British Broadcasting Corporation.  Marconi joined Mussolini's Italian Fascist party in 1923 and by 1930 was a member of the Grand Council.  He died, from a ninth heart attack in 1937, at age 63. 
  's low cost business model could not allow salaries to match the average in the high growth computing market, resulting in loss of staff and high usage of consultants for middle-management positions. 
  
• Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining the empires and their neighbors' interactions.  Turchin shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles.  After the summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is used to augment Turchins findings. 
  
  Collective solidarity can be critical to sustaining competitive advantage.  But oligopolies, groups who together control the majority of market share in a market.  If they act together they can exert monopoly control of the market. 
  and democracies can dissipate the forces that sustain solidarity and suffer at critical points in the industry cycle in competition with systems with other forms of leadership now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group.  Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership.  Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes.  John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. 
  . 
  
• Nokia purchased Symbian, a smart phone operating system used by most of the cellular phone manufacturing oligopoly, but were unable to respond to the entry of Apple's iPhone.  Telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver.  A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. 
  networks are
  This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent.  The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action.  The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns. 
  
  infrastructure amplifiers concentrating power in the oligopoly of network operators is responsible for the operation of a wide area physical network.  The network may be wireless or wire line.  It typically has subscribers who pay to send voice or data packets over the network.   and all their major suppliers. 
  
• Google's Android operating system offered the cellular phone manufacturing oligopoly a platform is agent generated infrastructure that supports emergence of an entity through: leverage of an abundant energy source, reusable resources; attracting a phenotypically aligned network of agents. 
  for competing with Apple's iPhone, but Google did not have the power to correct these powerful partner's platform design conflicts that impacted smart phone battery life.  
• Functional executives within a backwater of HP feuded for position and influence, as their general managers repeatedly changed during a high technology industry downturn.  Eventually threats from competitors and executives drove the business to build, and execute on a coherent shared plan. 
  
• This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business. 
  
  Disruption can generate outsize results for emerging businesses within an enterprise network.  
• Executives over-promising to gain investment search in vain for 'big opportunities' and ignore small bowling alley, in Geoffrey Moore's marketing strategies is a metaphor for focusing on a limited market segment, so as to capture and own it with a discrete product repeatedly.  wins.  In contrast Steve Jobs was an innovative entrepreneur who integrated art and culture with engineering, and is responsible for: the strong sexual selection force of the: Macintosh, iPod, iPad and iPhone; and their dedicated fan base.  He cofounded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak where Wozniak designed a particularly simple microprocessor based computer, the Apple 1 and Jobs made it elegant.  Struck by the relative simplicity and ease of use of PARC's Alto, Jobs and Wozniak began building the Lisa.  But Jobs decided it was flawed and took a small group aside to build the Macintosh which the whole team were happy to sign their names on the inside.  Born February 24th 1955, Steve's birth mother Joanne Schieble was forced by her father to have the boy adopted rather than allow her to marry his Muslim Syrian birth father, Abdulfattah Jandali, the last of nine children of a hugely wealthy trader, Walter Isaacson explains.  The baby was adopted by Paul Reinhold Jobs, a highly practical mechanic and a mild kind father, and Clara Hagopian, also sweet-humored, and when Steve was two they adopted Patty.  The Jobs lived in an Eichler (a design inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright), in Mountain View, California, which had a strong influence on Steve, as he explained to Isaacson, "Eichler did a great thing.  His houses were smart and cheap and good.  They brought clean design and simple taste to lower income people.  They had awesome little features, like radiant heating in the floors.  You put carpet on them, and we had nice toasty floors when we were kids."  Steve Jobs knew early on that he was adopted, which pained him supporting development of his Challenger personality type.  It was also clear to Steve that he was unlike his adopted parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, who stressed to him that they picked him specifically and that he was special.  They tolerated Steve's high risk activities and ensured he was safe when problems occurred.  Paul Jobs impressed Steve as a child, with his valuing quality workmanship, and his practical capabilities.  Paul could repair any car and Steve became interested in the electronics aspects.  He was helped by neighbors who were electrical engineers: Larry Lang; the geographic cluster that formed around Hewlett Packard and Intel.  And he then joined a neighborhood electronics club where he was introduced to Steve Wozniak.  But the young Steve Jobs was shocked when he discovered his father did not correctly understand some aspects of the world, and Steve realized he was much more intelligent than his parents Paul and Clara.  With their support he followed his curiosity and resisted any attempt to stop him.  His powerful drive made his parents, teachers, local business leaders: Bill Hewlett, Nolan Bushnell; and coaches go along.  At Reed College he pushed to attend courses he was interested in: calligraphy; rather than follow the syllabus, and they let him.  They even allowed him to continue when he stopped his parents from paying more tuition.  His stressed idealist continually sought out gurus: Shunryu Suzuki, Neem Karoli Baba; and visionaries who might help Steve understand who he really was. 
  , invests in the iPod and then leverages its iTunes web site, the Apple Stores, and profit stream to support further bowling alley opportunities which became the blockbuster, a business model which requires substantial resources to produce the product, but also generates outsize returns if it converts a majority of its potential market into customers. 
  iPhone and iPad ensuring the disruption of the music is a complex emergent capability supported by sexual selection and generating pleasure.  It transforms the sensing of epiphenomena: Contour, Rhythm, Tempo, Timbre; to induce salient representations: Harmony, Key, Loudness, Melody, Meter, Pitch, and perceptions: Reverberation - echo; which allow musicians: Elton John, Elvis Presley; to show their fitness: superior coordination, creativity, adolescent leadership, stamina; true for birds and humans.  Levitin showed that listening to music causes a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: auditory cortex, frontal regions, such as BA44 and BA47, and finally the mesolimbic system, culminating in the nucleus accumbens.  And he found the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout the session.  He argues music mimics some of the features of language and conveys some of the same emotions.  The brain regions pulse with the beat and predict the next one.  As the music is heard it is modeled and generates dopamine rewards for matching each beat and noting creative jokes in the rhythm.  The cerebellum finds pleasure in adjusting itself to stay synchronized. 
  , smart phone and PC is personal computer
  laptop businesses.  
• Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS).  The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained. 
  
  Shewhart cycles are important. 
  
• This page looks at schematic structures and their uses.  It discusses a number of examples:
  

  • Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity. 
  • Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them. 
  • Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations. 
  • Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models. 

  
  As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan. 
  
  Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals. 
  Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings. 
  These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples. 
  
  Planning is alien to forceful tacticians are goals and actions which respond to the actions of the enemy in a combat, rather than focusing on ones own strategic direction. 
  . 
  
• Functional managers repeatedly requested production of a written business plan, but the general manager responded by focusing on current issues and tactical opportunities. 
  
• Politician's memoirs lament how Prime Minister Gordon Brown's exceptional tactical skills left his cabinet isolated and without a coherent vision.  
• Business metrics must be matched to the industries and businesses they measure. 
  
• Hardware business leaders, promoted to enterprise executives, repeatedly cancelled software businesses as the businesses failed to grow revenues as required.  But the executives never adjusted their plan's models to reflect the characteristics of software businesses. 
  
• Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
  
  Memetic structures can be
  This page discusses the tagging of signals in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Tagged signals can be used to control filtering of an event stream.  Examples of CAS filters are reviewed. 
  
  tagged and selectively included within operating processes. 
  
• Reducing the peripheral detail associated with a
  This page looks at schematic structures and their uses.  It discusses a number of examples:
  

  • Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity. 
  • Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them. 
  • Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations. 
  • Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models. 

  
  As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan. 
  
  Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals. 
  Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings. 
  These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples. 
  
  plan such as the breadth of reports on the
  This page discusses a complex adaptive system (CAS) implementation of a genetic algorithm (GA), Melanie Mitchell's robot-janitor built as a set of Copycat codelets integrated using agent-based programming.  The improvement in the operation of the robots over succeeding generations of applying the GA is graphed. 
  
  The CAS that generated, and operated the robot is reviewed, including the implementation details and codelet operational program flow, and the challenges and limitations of this implementation. 
  
  The schematic strings which make up the robot's genotype, as well as the signals which are sent to the nucleus of the robot's agents so that the agents can deploy the appropriate response strings (which activate codelets) are listed.  The Slipnet configuration required by the system to associate the schematic strings with programmatic forces (codelets) is also listed.  The codelets and supporting perl are also listed. 
  
  In the conclusion the limitations of the robot-janitor abstraction in studying emergence and creative evolution are discussed and alternative experimental frameworks are proposed.  One such, the schematic cell is the subject of a separate page in this web frame. 
  
  
  development of the virtual robot, by selective filtering, improves the creative focus of agents performing
  Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS).  The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained. 
  
  Shewhart cycles.  
• This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.'  It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents.  It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form.  A proposal that does not conform is wrong. 
  
  John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
  
  Associating definitions of key theoretical concepts limits the proliferation of suitcase word use described by Marvin Minsky.  
• A successful workgroup mail provider agreed to source its next messaging server from a supplier of enterprise messaging, are solutions that major businesses deploy to provide them with corporation wide e-mail services. 
  technologies and products.  There were a number of one off strategic benefits to executives of both parties.  But the enterprise technologies did not scale down to small workgroups and eventually the partnership collapsed.  
• Practice results in effective improvement, but Jonah Lehrer argues, only when the practice is used to identify, and then correct errors. 
  
• This page discusses the tagging of signals in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Tagged signals can be used to control filtering of an event stream.  Examples of CAS filters are reviewed. 
  
  Tags and filtering of signals allows agents within businesses to coordinate within a decentralized operating structure, just as
  E. O. Wilson & Bert Holldobler illustrate how bundled cooperative strategies can take hold.  Various social insects have developed strategies which have allowed them to capture the most valuable available niches.  Like humans they invest in specialization and cooperate to subdue larger, well equipped competitors. 
  
  insect super organisms do.  
• Xerox hardware support engineers informally met for breakfast, and shared customer experiences including tricky problems and how they had fixed them.  Executives, trying to formalize the process, replaced the breakfasts with a data sharing tool reducing the coordination and cooperation within the engineering group. 
  
• Web page generator filters can tie html links within a web page to the focus of the included information.  This can help sustain the focus of the reader of the page, and reduce the likelihood of logic distortions that can occur with too much, and or unrelated streams of input as described by Jonah Lehrer. 
  
• This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent.  The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action.  The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns. 
  
  Infrastructure amplifiers provide access to concentrated resources.  
• Google's access to their customer's search requests allowed search term modeling, improved search algorithms, more effective rankings, further driving up searches and advertising revenues. 
  
• General Electric's financial business GE Capital provided GE and its customers with access to low cost capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty.  Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital.  It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists.  It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital).  . 
  
• The HADOOP is an open source implementation of the 'big data' distributed file system architecture used by Google to support its map-reduce programs. The map-reduce programs construct associations between vast numbers of web pages and typical search terms. 
  distributed storage technology enables applications to access vast amounts of low cost, localized computing and storage resources.  
• Apple's iTunes and Apple Stores provide iPhone application developers with low cost solutions to capturing the value they offer to application users.  
• Scanned image systems initially relied on custom hardware to support the image scanning and transform operations.  However, exponential increase in general computing power rapidly provided software solutions with competitive advantage, and the custom hardware value chains collapsed. 
  
• This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  Evolutionary amplifiers encourage responses that support selection.  
• Apple's iPhone application developers invest in the platform is agent generated infrastructure that supports emergence of an entity through: leverage of an abundant energy source, reusable resources; attracting a phenotypically aligned network of agents. 
  because the iPhone installed base represents a large base of potential application users.  The large base of applications for the iPhone attracts further developers, while discouraging them from targeting smart phone platforms with small application portfolios. 
  
• General Electric's leverage of GE Capital to
  This page introduces some problems that make it hard for a business to execute effectively. 
  It then presents a theory of execution. 
  It describes what the theory says must be done to execute effectively. 
  It reviews General Electric's use of adaptive planning to support effective execution. 
  Then it details the execution requirements. 
  
  smooth results of all its operating businesses ensured investors discounted GE stock uncertainty is when a factor is hard to measure because it is dependent on many interconnected agents and may be affected by infrastructure and evolved amplifiers.  This is different from risk, although the two are deliberately conflated by ERISA.  Keynes argued that most aspects of the future are uncertain, at best represented by ordinal probabilities, and often only by capricious hope for future innovation, fear inducing expectations of limited confidence, which evolutionary psychology implies is based on the demands of our hunter gatherer past.  Deacon notes reduced uncertainty equates to information. 
  building a positive cycle of investment, competitive wins and capital accumulation.  The cycle was only broken when the 2008 financial crisis removed GEs cash cushion, inhibiting them from buffering their business results and causing last-minute restatements of results.  
• The broad adoption of open standards presented IT departments with the opportunity to change, and reduce the costs of their infrastructure.  But the evolved amplifier which pushed the agents, and infrastructure suppliers, forward promoted poor, as well as good, standards, for example OSI (OSI), a set of communications interconnection standards defined by the International Standards Organization (ISO) global standards body.  OSI competed unsuccessfully with the IETF's TCP/IP.  The basic seven layer 'model' of OSI is still influential. 
  networking, even when these were in conflict with valuable features.  The result was just extended product sales cycles, except where deployable alternative standards, like TCP (TCP), a point-to-point connection oriented protocol specified and standardized by IETF and widely implemented in Internet communications. 
  /IP (IP), a datagram based connectionless protocol specified by the IETF.  It can be used by TCP as its network layer protocol when sending and receiving data packets.  , became available.  
• Barefoot coffee roasters, focused on their Italian espresso vision and connections to small artisan coffee bean growers, to roast high end niche coffees.  Their specially trained baristas entered nationwide competitions where their skills and the Barefoot coffee roasts could be highlighted.  The reputation generated broader awareness and acceptance of the lighter Italian styles they made and the complexity and balance of the flavors from the artisan beans.  Interest from high end markets such as Whole Foods completed the evolved amplification. 
  
• This page discusses the benefits of bringing agents and resources to the dynamically best connected region of a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  
  Centralization pairs
  To benefit from shifts in the environment agents must be flexible.  Being sensitive to environmental signals agents who adjust strategic priorities can constrain their competitors. 
  
  flexibility and amplifiers. 
  
• Google's Android smart phone architecture and partnerships improve Google's access to search activities by mobile users.  
• Emotion circuits rapidly bring attention to focus on evolutionarily significant signals. 
  
• This page discusses the benefits of proactively strengthening strong points. 
  
  Prophylaxis focuses agents on strong points.  
• 'Google books' expands the potential benefits of web searching.  
• Concentrated focus on salient activities protects the limited attention span of high level agents from information overload.  
• IBM's successful mainframe office systems strategy became undermined by open standards.  IBM worked with a variety of vendors to gain access to standards based office systems technologies.  By requiring confidentiality they were able to test the value of the technologies and their ability to deliver solutions to their customers, and then select a centralizing technology from the alternatives.  Eventually they purchased the company who supplied the core technologies. 
  
• Weak points become the focus of competition.  
  
• Home owners, with poor credit ratings, were happy to use subprime loans.  It reduced their cost of credit. 
  
• Individual
  The structure and problems of the US health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  The network:
  

  • Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the conflict between two opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net or low tax without.  The emergence of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the network.  
  • The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous levels of: salt, sugar, cigarettes, guns, light, cell phones, opioids, costly education, global travel, antibacterials, formula, foods including endocrine disrupters;
    
  • Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress, amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of walking, microbiome collapse;
  • Globalization connects disparate environments in a network.  At the edges, humans are drastically altering the biosphere.  That is reducing the proximate natural environment's connectedness, and leaving its end-nodes disconnected and far less diverse.  This disconnects predators from their prey, often resulting in local booms and busts that transform the local parasite network and their reservoir and amplifier hosts.  The situation is setup so that man is introduced to spillover from the local parasites' hosts.  Occasionally, but increasingly, the spillover results in humanity becoming broadly infected.  The evolved specialization of the immune system to the proximate environment during development becomes undermined as the environment transforms. 
    
  • Is incented to focus on localized competition generating massive & costly duplication of services within physician based health care operations instead of proven public health strategies.  This process drives increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope for each new technological breakthrough. 
    
  • Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation and indirection of service development, provision, reimbursement and payment. 
    
  • Is impacted by the different political strategies for managing the increasing cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees.  
  • Is presented with acute and chronic problems to respond to.  As currently setup the network is tuned to handle acute problems.  The interactions with patients tend to be transactional. 
    
  • Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure which is:
  • Costly and inefficient
  • Structured around yearly contracts which undermine long-term health goals and strategies.  
  • Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has entrenched commercial EHR products deep within the hospital systems.  
  • Is maintained, and kept in alignment, by massive network effects across the:
  • Hospital platform based sub-networks connecting to
    
  • Physician networks
  • Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA narrow network legislation
    
  • Hospital clinical supply and food production networks
    
  • Medical school and academic research network and NIH
    
  • Global transportation network 
  • Public health networks 
  • Health care IT supply network
    
  health care policies are of interest to at risk, is an assessment of the likelihood of an independent problem occurring.  It can be assigned an accurate probability since it is independent of other variables in the system.  As such it is different from uncertainty. 
  individuals with dependents willing to pay the price to mediate the potential of catastrophic health care costs. 
  
• Google docs and chrome browser offer a free alternative to Microsoft's PC is personal computer
  based full priced office products and browser.  A direct response to the asymmetric attack would impact Microsoft's profitability.  
• The euro zone is the group of countries within the EU that use the euro currency.  Economic decisions regarding the euro are centralized through the Eurogroup.   argued that Greece and Ireland must limit their spending and increase revenues to gain access to low cost debt and build a competitive workforce.  The euro zone is being
  This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business. 
  
  disrupted by low cost Chinese business competition, and uncompetitive wages sustained by the euro's value.  The euro zone leaves tax policy to individual countries within the zone and is limited in its ability to cross fund the member nations.  CAS theory suggests that only new niche creation, aligned with investment and protection from disruption's effects, will generate substantial new growth within the zone.  Consequently international investors are able to short is a multi part transaction where:
  
  • A borrowed tradable asset (this part of the transaction is not performed in the naked version) is sold under the assumption that the asset is going to fall in price during the period when it has been borrowed. 
    
  • Once the asset falls in price it is then purchased. 
    
  • The asset is returned to the lender, with any additional risk premium. 
    
  • The short seller keeps any profit.  If the asset gained value during the period of the short then the seller makes a loss.  
  the euro zone and gain leverage from the zone's own policies. 
  
• Alternative objectives create dilemmas for the competition.  
• Apple's iPod business created a dilemma for Microsoft.  Microsoft responded with an equivalent MP3 music is a complex emergent capability supported by sexual selection and generating pleasure.  It transforms the sensing of epiphenomena: Contour, Rhythm, Tempo, Timbre; to induce salient representations: Harmony, Key, Loudness, Melody, Meter, Pitch, and perceptions: Reverberation - echo; which allow musicians: Elton John, Elvis Presley; to show their fitness: superior coordination, creativity, adolescent leadership, stamina; true for birds and humans.  Levitin showed that listening to music causes a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: auditory cortex, frontal regions, such as BA44 and BA47, and finally the mesolimbic system, culminating in the nucleus accumbens.  And he found the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout the session.  He argues music mimics some of the features of language and conveys some of the same emotions.  The brain regions pulse with the beat and predict the next one.  As the music is heard it is modeled and generates dopamine rewards for matching each beat and noting creative jokes in the rhythm.  The cerebellum finds pleasure in adjusting itself to stay synchronized. 
  player.  However, while Apple leveraged its iPod success to improve its iPod business it also ensured that it could reuse the infrastructure for its iPhone and iPad businesses.  As each business was initiated the direct competitors failed to respond to the direct or indirect value exposed by Apple. 
  
• Unbalancing of the model and action agents
  This page discusses the interdependence of perception and representation in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Hofstadter and Mitchell's research with Copycat is reviewed.  The bridging of a node from a network of 'well known' percepts to a new representational instance is discussed as it occurs in biochemistry, in consciousness and abstractly. 
  
  perceptions and representations.  
• General electric repeatedly signalled the markets, investors and competitors that their processes and talent pool ensured competitive success.  The results they announced quarter after quarter added credence to the signals.  The effects of GE Capital was discreetly leveraged, indirectly impacting GE's competitors positions.  
• Broad adoption of a technology platform is agent generated infrastructure that supports emergence of an entity through: leverage of an abundant energy source, reusable resources; attracting a phenotypically aligned network of agents. 
  dependent on CAS agents branching from
  This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single initialized child cell.  For multi-cellular organisms this 'cell' must contain all the germ-line schematic structures including for organelles and multi-generational epi-genetic state.  Any microbiome is subsequently integrated during the innovative deployment of this creative event.  Organisms with skeletal infrastructure cannot complete the process of creation of an associated adult mind, until the proximate environment has been sampled during development.  The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed. 
  
  single celled node consequently happens
  Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved dramatically.  W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred.
  
  slowly.  
• HP's Newwave aimed to deploy object orientation and agent infrastructure above Microsoft's 'new' Windows platform.  But for these new facilities to operate effectively all the pc applications would need to be re-written specifically to comply with additional requirements and constraints of these services.  Most new pc applications were attempting to effectively use windowing, while other required applications were run in a DOS window.  
• Deployments of new technology occur emergently.  HP's attempt to sell popular US is the United States of America.   voicemail systems to UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.   enterprises during the eighties was undermined by a lack of tone dialing telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver.  A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. 
  handsets within the UK.  Only the US market had broadly replaced pulse dial handsets with tone dialing at the time.  
• The emergence of
  Representing state in emergent entities is essential but difficult.  Various structures are used to enhance the rate and scope of state transitions.  Examples are discussed. 
  
  structurally enhanced state allows relative real-time advantage to be gained.  But
  Agents can manage uncertainty by limiting their commitments of resources until the environment contains signals strongly correlated with the required scenario.  This page explains how agents can use Shewhart cycles and SWOT processes to do this. 
  
  commitments should still match pre-conditions. 
  
• HP's productizing of highly parallelized networks of workflow, in business processes define the movement of a case file between cooperating agents who when they possess the case perform the activities outlined in the flow to complete a process.  The flows and their control have been automated with workflow servers moving the case to the agents.  The flowchart style model of the automated flows does not typically reflect the true adaptive nature of the collaborative interactions of the agents.   servers spiked interest from diverse solution developers from telecoms networks, insurance reduces volatility in standard of living by compensating for losses of income during periods of unemployment, for catastrophic losses from disaster, or death of a family income earner as described by Gordon.  Insurance companies must set aside reserves to handle such claims.  Britain initially required that insurance buyers also have an insurable interest.  That is required in insurance markets to ensure buyers of insurance don't destroy their asset just to obtain the insurance.  Health insurance is treated separately being unusual, since the subscriber is likely to know more about their state of health than the insurer is and the subscriber is more likely to purchase the health insurance when aware of their increased risk.  This behavior collapses the risk pool by: forcing the insurer to increase the premiums, and encouraging healthy individuals to opt out of health insurance coverage.   claims to office systems.  But the core transaction is an operation which guarantees to complete a defined set of activities or return to the initial state.  For a fee the postal service will ensure that a parcel is delivered to its recipient or will return the parcel to the sender.  To provide the service it may have to undo the act of trying to deliver the parcel with a compensating action.  Since the parcel could be lost or destroyed the service may have to return an equivalent value to the sender.   times were still far too long to be appropriate for milli-second operations already required in some of the markets.  The applicable niches turned out to be too limited for the extensive resources allocated to the developments.  
• Centralized management information systems proved to be of limited value to the executives they were intended to support.  The information that they could aggregate was generally irrelevant to the decisions that the executives were focused on. 
  
• The use of web based infrastructure to gather and distribute event notifications to web users, risks overloading attention, and altering the weightings of focusing mechanisms in the brain.  Analogous challenges in the primate brain, are managed by low level neuron networks, a network of interconnected neurons which perform signalling, modeling and control functions.  In Cajal's basic neural circuits the signalling is unidirectional.  He identified three classes of neurons in the circuits:
  • Sensory, Interneurons, Motor; which are biochemically distinct and suffer different disease states. 
    
  expressed as senses such as fear, and hunger which are connected to input sensors by relatively fast connections in parallel to those connecting the sensors to the brain's cognitive is the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals according to Princeton's Jonathan Cohen. 
  areas.   The sensors also process information locally forwarding on only summaries.  
• An Adaptive web framework (AWF)
  This page describes a schematic system about abstracted neurons operating in a circuit. 
  The neuronal system was designed to focus in on the cellular nature of a schematically defined neuron. 
  The goals include:
  

  • Development of a system of cells, their differentiation and deployment into a neuron network. 
    
  • Abstract receptor operation must support interactions of a network of neurons and attached cells. 

  THE IMPLEMENTATION IS INCOMPLETE AND ONGOING. 
  The codelets and infrastructure are included. 
  
  neuron network needs to associate its sensor cells structurally enhanced state with local processing power.  A highly threaded implementation of the codelets and the
  This page describes the Copycat Coderack. 
  The details of the codelet architecture are described. 
  The specialized use of the Coderack by the adaptive web framework's (AWF) Smiley is discussed. 
  The codelet scheduling mechanism is discussed. 
  A variety of Smiley extensions to the Coderack are reviewed. 
  The Coderack infrastructure functions are included. 
  
  Coderack, or HADOOP is an open source implementation of the 'big data' distributed file system architecture used by Google to support its map-reduce programs. The map-reduce programs construct associations between vast numbers of web pages and typical search terms. 
  distributed racks, would limit the impact of sensor processing on higher level neuron, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
    
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals.  The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged. 
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
    
  activity. 
  

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