David K. Hurst has spent twenty-five years as an operating manager, often handling crises and turnaround conditions, and is also a widely experienced consultant, teacher, and writer on business topics and issues. This book is his innovative integration of management practice and theory, using a systems perspective and analogies drawn from nature to illustrate groundbreaking ideas and their real-world application. Hurst's objective is to help readers make meaning from their own management experience and education, and to encourage improvement in their practical judgment and wisdom. His core argument is that the human mind is rational in an ecological, rather than a logical, sense. He supports his case with an approach that connects the development of organizations to humankind's evolutionary heritage and cultural history. Contexts matter, and Hurst shows how passion, reason, and power can be used to change and sustain organizations for good and ill.