Though expensive and usually belated, reorganizations are widely regarded as the only way to realign an organization with its environment. As a report by the Boston Consulting Group put it, “Rapid change requires companies to reorganize faster than ever before.” Good luck with that!

What’s needed are radically new organizational models that downplay formal structure. In a world of relentless change, trade-offs need to be made as close to the front lines as possible. Boundaries must be malleable. Resources, rather than being hoarded, must flow unhindered toward promising opportunities. Interunit coordination must be the product of nimble, self-organizing communities and market-like transactions rather than blanket policies or cumbersome councils. In short, we need organizations that, like the biosphere, the internet, or a vibrant city, are more emergent than engineered.

Zhang often reminds his colleagues that it’s impossible to engineer a complex system from the top down. It has to emerge through an iterative process of experimentation and learning. When asked how Haier can accelerate its transformation, Zhang has a simple answer: run more trials and replicate the most successful ones faster.

Even when an organization is led by a pioneering CEO like Jan Wallander or Zhang Ruimin, crafting a new management model is more about “discover and test” than “engineer and impose.

Remaking Strat Planning turned out to be the most significant accomplishment of that six-month period before I took over the company. I knew that it would have an immediate practical effect, but the announcement that they would no longer have such an iron grip on all aspects of our business had a powerful, instantaneous effect on morale. It was as if all the windows had been thrown open and fresh air was suddenly moving through. As one of our senior executives said to me at the time, “If there were church bells on the steeples throughout Disney, they would be ringing.

But they were wrong. The Soviet Union collapsed, the Pruitt-Igoe project was demolished, and the people who transformed the business world were not the men who employed armies of re-engineering consultants. The people who did transform the business world were those, like Google’s Sergey Brin and Apple’s Steve Jobs, who adopted a more oblique approach to business transformation. They invented new businesses rather than re-engineer old ones, they adapted and improvised endlessly, and they carried employees and customers along with them on a waver of enthusiasm.