> The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation. Providing the shareholders with a return on their investments is a requirement, not an objective.<p>I love this quote. At first it sounds very critical, but thinking about it more it reveals something deeper: companies are a collection of people, if those people aren’t satisfied with the work they will move on and delivering value to investors will be that much harder. So maximize for worker happiness while delivering enough ROI to your investors, not the other way around.
The <i>Six Revelations</i> from the article:<p><pre><code> Improving the performance of the parts of a system taken separately will not necessarily improve the performance of the whole; in fact, it may harm the whole.
Problems are not disciplinary in nature but are holistic.
The best thing that can be done to a problem is not to solve it but to dissolve it.
The healthcare system of the United States is not a healthcare system; it is a sickness and disability-care system.
The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers—and teaching is a major obstruction to learning.
The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation.</code></pre>
> The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers—and teaching is a major obstruction to learning.<p>Yes and no. Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt has a different take (one I agree with), which argues that the educational system is dedicated to producing political discipline. Yes, this serves the interest of the teachers, and no, the system is not designed to produce learning. But it's highly arguable whether you could truly design, build, and sustainably run an institution which reliably produces autodidacts and independent thinkers, particularly at higher levels, particularly since it's difficult to impossible to measure how reliably such an institution is succeeding at its mission.
> Effective research is not disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary; it is transdisciplinary... Disciplines are taken by science to represent different parts of the reality we experience. In effect, science assumes that reality is structured and organized in the same way universities are.<p>Not just the sciences. Rigid, path-dependent taxonomies are a plague in all disciplines and in daily life.
I have been thinking a lot about Systems Thinking recently. Will Larson writes in <i>An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management</i> that it's one of the most useful general tools he's discovered for approaching management problems. That inspired me to read Donella Meadows <i>Thing in Systems</i>, but even after reading that, I'm not sure how to apply it to engineering organizations. It's only tangential to this topic, but if anyone has a good course or book that works through examples which can be transferred to managing engineering teams or organizations, I'd be grateful. When I read most systems thinking materials I get the sense that they are mostly focused on civilization-level problems like global warming, rather than on ways that I can individually use it to understand and make changes within my more prosaic scope.<p>I also have a little bit of the feeling that the emperor has no clothes, since in spite of all their ideas, I can't find any major company that has successfully transformed an industry based on systems thinking, nor can I find any major social ill that has been solved through the application of systems thinking. If anyone has any concrete cases of those, I'd also be interested.<p>I have a blog post working on applying Donella Meadows' Leverage Points to an engineering problem (incident retrospectives), but it's unsatisfying enough that I haven't figured out how to make it publishable.
Somewhat buried, but this my favorite takeaway<p>>Errors of omission are generally much more serious than errors of commission, but errors of commission are the only ones picked up by most accounting systems. Since mistakes are a no-no in most corporations, and the only mistakes identified and measured are ones involving doing something that should not have been done, the best strategy for managers is to do as little as possible. No wonder managerial paralysis prevails in American organizations.<p>I've seen bright forward thinking leaders who delivered results get canned when one reasonable bet doesn't pay off, but mostly I've watched decision-makers stall when action is badly needed. This explains very succinctly what is wrong with so many places I've worked.
I liked the article ; one additional lesson I got from it is that you should not change your writing paradigm mid post. The first few bullets are things that he's disproving. Then they're things he concluded. I had to read again to understand he changed his writing
It's the guy, Russell Ackoff! I still remember reading all about Systems Thinking from year 1. Do they still use the same material in Systems Design Engineering?
> The interactive manager plans backward from where he wants to be ideally, right now, not forward to where he wants to be in the future.<p>I'm having trouble understanding this point. Is he saying the interactive manager looks backwards at what he might have done differently in the past, to be in a better place today? Would a better term for this be a "retrospective manager"?<p>Or does this mean something else?
Here is a PDF version of the article. Apparently its from a 1999 speech given at Villanova. <a href="https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/100501pk.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/100501...</a>
Site’s down <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210606160159/https://thesystemsthinker.com/a-lifetime-of-systems-thinking/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20210606160159/https://thesystem...</a>