Kat, Karen, Kate... thanks for your thoughts!

I think I'm still squarely on the other side of the fence. Karen comments that "people just don't like admitting that something may be at the end of its natural life span." But I don't think organizations have a natural life span... it's that darn life cycle _meta_phor that tricks us into thinking that they do.

This isn't to say that organizations may not run to the end of their usefulness. They might do everything they set out to do, or the environment might change such that they don't have a purpose any more, or another organization might spring up that is more competitive or useful. But I prefer the concepts of goal attainment, fit with the environment, and competition when describing these situations. Life cycle just doesn't help me.

I know, I know, consultants have been using the idea for a decade or better, and some have gotten a lot of mileage out of it. Keep on! But the idea got dismissed from the study of management before it caught fire in consulting arenas. In 1980, John Kimberly wrote "Death is an inevitable feature of biological life. The same cannot be said of organizations. There is nothing about organizational life in itself that, of necessity, implies organizational death. There is no inevitable linear sequence of stages in organizational life, although there may be remarkable similarities among the developmental patterns of certain clusters of organizations. If there are laws that govern the development of organizations, analogous to those that apparently govern the development of organisms, they are yet to be discovered." Since then, it's been almost completely absent from theory and research on organizations.

But in the real world, it seems to have some currency. Kate calls the concept and language "very valuable." Maybe that's evidence of the gap between what's talked about in business schools and what's talked about in the real world.

Mark