Rational Goal Model

Open Systems Model

The open systems model introduced by Paul Lawrence (b. 1933) and Jay Lorsch (b. 1934) in the third quarter of the twentieth century stresses the importance of the managerial external flexibility that results from exercising the innovator and broker role responsibilities in order to adapt continually to changing environmental forces (Lawrence and Lorsch 1967). Sustainable innovation is achieved by cultivating organizational learning cultures, developing cross-functional organizational competencies for continuous creativity, and respecting quality and ecological system limits while negotiating for external resource acquisition, building sustainable entrepreneurial networks, and enabling creative system improvement.

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) used statistical quality control to separate special and common causes of variation, fixing the former and accepting the latter to improve production systems continually by narrowing the range of acceptable performance variation over time. Deming's message to managers was that because most performance variations are the result of common causes, that is, fall within a normal range of statistical variation, managers should focus on improving the production system instead of overcontrolling employees.

Paul Shrivastava (b. 1939) focuses on entrepreneurial ecocentric management of sustainable development systems that technologically prevent and/or control pollution of nature and corruption of sociopolitical systems over time. The strength of this model is that it accounts for managers' envisioning improvements and acquiring resources for sustainable system development. The exclusive and extreme emphasis on the open systems model, however, results in disrupted operational continuity and energy wasted on unrealistic change projects.