ABSTRACT
Multiple dimensions of complex large- scale enterprises—including number of stakeholders, emergent properties, changing environments and landscapes, and uncertain futures—pose enormous technical challenges requiring the contributions of multiple disciplines, theories, and methods. Descriptive enterprise dynamics builds on the concept of descriptive geometries and involves the mapping of the highly multidimensional enterprise state- space into the decision space for management of system and technology acquisition, policy formulation, and business operations. The concept of landscapes has been applied to organization theory and enterprise fitness to deal with operations performance and management regimes that deal with people, organizations, and policies. It has also been applied to various scientific domains, including biological evolution and string theory in physics at a cosmological scale. Enterprise landscapes are used here as a basic structure for descriptive enterprise dynamics. Sense- and- respond decision- making processes are mapped into these domains and are key factors in the dynamic behavior of enterprises.
