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This paper describes the ways in which the next decade will be different from the last. Times are becoming more and more turbulent and a new kind of organisation is needed to survive and thrive in these times ‐ what we call a purposeful self‐renewing organisation (PS‐RO). This, in turn, requires a different style of organisational leadership ‐ leadership as a quality that is dispersed across the organisation not confined solely to the cadre of senior managers listed on an organisational chart.

The aim of this paper is to offer practitioners the outline of a unique system to facilitate organizational renewal.

The authors are veteran practitioners who have observed and studied best practices in a variety of corporate and governmental settings to create a new renewal methodology. One of the authors is a former Shell Oil Company senior manager. These SAMI researchers offer a system to facilitate organizational renewal.

While few organizations implement the described methodology, many implement parts: the full effect – a purposeful self‐renewing organization – is only achieved through the combination of the parts.

This article is based on research for the authors' new book, Beyond Crisis: Achieving Renewal in a Turbulent World (Wiley 2010), co‐authored with Patricia Lustig.

This paper provides practitioners with the first blueprint for implementing and managing operations, innovation, and foresight in a purposefully self‐renewing organization.

This is one of the first articles to describe a complete system that analyses a changing business environment and applies the methodology to operations to effectively promote a purposefully self‐renewing organization.

Bosco, Liu, and West's chapter on underground lotteries in rural China is one that begs permission to cross the boundaries between parts of this volume, for it deals with the integration of the Chinese economy with others, and it also poses certain moral questions about the nature of markets and rationality in economic exchanges (see also Suarez, this volume). But the authors, after reviewing the evidence, ultimately conclude that China's underground lotteries must be viewed in relation to that country's phenomenal economic development in recent decades. They show that the rise of illegal underground lotteries in China is tightly connected to the development of the modern capitalist economy there, and that although it seems at first glance to be powered by irrationality and superstition, it actually functions according to capitalist principles – at least as viewed by the participants. They also argue that rural villagers who place bets in them are not mere victims of nonsensical beliefs or of opportunistic “outsiders,” but rather that they are participating in their own way in a system in which luck clearly plays a very large role, but one over which they have little control, and one that is grounded in the historical commercialized economy of China (see also Richardson, 1999). It is interesting to note the way that participants rationalize the lottery and their actions through their assumption that it is rigged – their approach to it is markedly different from that of someone from, for example, Japan or the United States, where such a lottery is assumed from the start to not be rigged. Bosco and co-authors well demonstrate here the importance of viewing a cultural phenomenon as part of a greater whole, and one in a constant state of flux.