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Natural Corporate Management (NCM) uses natural processes to manage a business firm, especially the large, complex, modern corporation. This website provides an introduction to Natural Corporate Management: how to identify it, how to use it to advantage, and how to avoid its misuse.
NCM: THE CONCEPT.
Natural Corporate Management represents a new way of thinking about and understanding the natural forces that influence the business firm’s operations both internally and externally. The most obvious external concern is a company’s success in achieving long-term sustainability while reducing its negative impact on people and the natural environment. However, nature also works inside the corporation, affecting goal-seeking, motives, work attitudes, organization design, decision making, strategy, and corporate policy.
NCM: NATURAL SCIENCE INFRASTRUCTURE.
NCM is based on empirical, verified, scientific research knowledge generated by the natural sciences. The most directly applicable sciences include behavioral economics, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, genetics, complexity science, and ecology. Other sciences give useful background information: thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, primatology, molecular biology.
NCM: BASIC OPERATING PRINCIPLES.
- NCM entails recognition and acceptance of nature’s presence and influence on the business firm.
- Human phenomena—organic bodily form/function, behavior, beliefs, social interactions, organizational forms, identity, consciousness—are a derivative function of adaptive evolutionary processes.
- Human culture is an extension and expression of nature, marked by past/earlier adaptive success but often perpetuating chronologically irrelevant practices.
- Neural dynamics—self/ego adaptive impulse, emotion, interpersonal reciprocity, social identity, curiosity/exploratory impulse—are genetic drivers of human (and business) behavior, reflecting present and past adaptive practice.
- Organizational form, internal dynamics, and outcomes in the business firm are indeterminate, unpredictable, probabilistic, and largely uncontrollable functions and spontaneous expressions of complex self-organizing adaptive processes.
- Homo sapiens is an evolved organic species living predominantly within competitive ecosystems marked by familial, clan, tribal, ethnic, national, and sociocultural distinctions, identities, and rivalries.
- Cohesiveness, commonality, and cooperation among human groups are a function of evolutionary social contracts.
- A business firm’s longevity is an operational measure of its success in managing and manipulating the complex natural processes that underlie and drive the firm’s activities.
- The normative, moral dimension of business practice—its Corporate Social Responsibility status, its Business Ethics and Values profile—is a manifestation and judgment of the firm’s adaptive impact on itself, its stakeholders, its host ecosystem, and planetary well-being.
NCM: AREAS OF MANAGERIAL APPLICATION.
An NCM approach can be applied at all levels of organizational authority and to all normal functions of the business firm:
- Organization design
- Finance, accounting, and control systems
- Production and information networks
- Behavioral motives and drives
- Competitive dynamics and marketing
- Technological innovation
- Goal setting
- Corporate strategy
- Community interactions
- Globalization processes and issues
- Government regulatory interactions
- Stakeholder relationships
- Socio-ethnic Entrepreneurship
NCM: REFERENCES.
Theoretical Analysis by William C. Frederick
Extensions, applications, and commentary on
Basic Theory and Applications by Selected Authors