There is nothing worse than being at the tail end of a trend. It’s annoying to be the last of your friends to know about a popular new band. It’s painful to be the last investor to buy what was the hottest stock. It’s embarrassing to write a book about a subject that has become old hat—which is exactly what Richard T. Pascale, Mark Millemann, and Linda Gioja did in Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business.

This is the umpteenth book to seek a unified field theory of business and biology. By now, most people are at least familiar with the idea that businesses and markets can be thought of as ecosystems and chaos theory can shed light on the complicated patterns in them. Many are bored with the subject. I know I am.

The book could have been saved if it were brilliantly executed and offered fresh insights. But it isn’t, and it doesn’t.

Even the title is awful. It’s as if the authors took three pop terms—"surfing," "edge," and "chaos"—and stuck them together.

About the only reason to read the book is if you don’t know anything about the subject (if so, shame on you), or if you are so fascinated with the subject that you want to read everything written about it. Otherwise, you can safely skip it.

It’s not that I disagree with the authors when they say that business needs to move beyond strict command-and-control structures. Those structures were developed for Industrial Age companies and organizations, such as U.S. Steel Group (www.ussteel.com) and the U.S. Army (www.army.mil), at a time when the business world was thought to behave according to strict rules, sort of like Newtonian physics. In the Information Age, however, things are different. The world of business is understood to be much more fluid, and more interdependent. A chief executive can’t simply bark out orders and expect everyone to follow. Even if that were possible, it wouldn’t be the best approach, because things change too quickly. By the time a CEO understood what was going on, devised a plan, and communicated orders to all his troops, it would be too late.

My problem is just that the book’s thinking has been around since shortly after James Gleick popularized chaos theory in his 1988 book, Chaos: Making a New Science.

The only redeeming part of Surfing the Edge of Chaos can be summarized in one sentence that has nothing to do with chaos theory: "Conversation is the source and soul of change." The authors offer plenty of examples from Sears, Roebuck & Co. (www.sears.com); FedEx Corp. (www.fedex.com); and other organizations that show how CEOs got their companies moving in the right direction by merely engaging management and employees in conversation on an issue.

There is one other area where the authors also try to break new ground. They suggest "seven disciplines" that companies must continually engage in if they are to survive. Among them are: "Foster relentless discomfort"; and "Insist on uncompromising straight talk." Those ideas, and the others, are perfectly fine. But, instead of letting these principles stand on their own, the authors try to shoehorn them into chaos theory, and it just doesn’t work.

The authors say their principles are fractals, a mathematical construction that figures in chaos theory. A fractal describes how seemingly random shapes (like the edge of a lake, or shape of a tree), can be described as being made of tiny patterns combined over and over again. And it’s true that, if each employee practices these seven disciplines, there will be a cascading effect on the entire company. But that doesn’t make them fractals.

The attempts at pseudo-science create other problems, too, by loading the book up with mumbo jumbo. For instance, the authors write: "Because discontinuous leaps, by their very nature, arise from unforeseen combinations, it is impossible to reverse engineer them. Extrapolation is possible when systems exhibit continuity over a wide range of conditions. In this circumstance, the relationship of the components is linear and the goal can be attained by progressing step by step."

Come to think of it, that might loosely be described as a fractal. If you imagine that passage multiplying throughout the book, and then building on itself as fractals do, you can get a sense for just what a mess this book is.

With three young children, Nee knows a thing or two about living on the edge of a chaotic environment. He is even thinking of turning it into a book, Thriving on Chaos: Lessons from Parenting. Nee can be reached at eric_nee@timeinc.com.