Book excerpt: The Quest for Fitness: A rational exploration into the new science of organizations follows the tradition of Frederick Taylor and W. Edwards Deming by rationally applying scientific principles and processes to understanding the nature of organization. The book recognizes that the environment has changed drastically since Taylor applied Newtonian principles to describe the industrial organization. The synthesis forces the reader to change his/her view from considering how an organization can be created to take control of its environment to how one can be created to survive over time in a changing environment. The Quest for Fitness leaves the reader with a vision of organizations as complex adaptive organisms striving to stay fit on an ever-changing landscape. There is an ongoing search to optimize one’s position in an uncharted wilderness. Survival is not dependent upon the strongest but upon the ability to adapt as the landscape changes. The leaders of such organizations are no longer commanders, but explorers, who create network infrastructures enabling information to be received, integrated, and shared throughout the organization so that individual parts can best respond to immediate conditions, without the total system flying apart.