By correctly identifying the constraint (bottleneck) of our organization, we can manage its inherent complexity with greater precision and predictability. As we saw in the last entry of this blog, every human process, from getting to work in the morning to sending a man to the moon, is affected by variation. In other words, a […]
Leadership of a Sustainable Enterprise
A leader is somebody who has a theory; somebody who “owns” a body of knowledge that backs his claims that they can accomplish a transformation within their span of control. That transformation must be one of system optimization as a prerequisite for innovation; one in which competition is replaced by cooperation, where performances are managed […]
Sustainable Enterprise – You Know It Makes Sense
What is a sustainable enterprise, what does it takes to create it, and how can it be achieved and maintained? In an ideal world, every business would be sustainable, and therefore inherently a social enterprise. People would just realize it makes more sense for everyone in the long run. That’s clearly not the way things […]
Flawed Models – Why We Need a New Economics
What is is wrong with mainstream economic and financial models today? Continuing the series on a New Economics. Mainstream economic and financial models, the ones that currently rule the markets and determine value, have shifted their focus over the years from what is best for the society they should try to model to what is […]
What Do We Mean By A New Economics?
Best efforts and hard work, not guided by new knowledge, they only dig deeper the pit we are in. The aim of this book is to provide new knowledge. Deming, The New Economics. Economics as a ‘political science’ A new knowledge was created by W. Edwards Deming for creating systems-based organizations. That knowledge calls […]
Network of Networks (continued): The Intrinsic Risk of Super Hubs
When an enterprise is successful and grows in size, there is inevitably an increase in the number and quality of interdependencies, i.e. exchanges with other parts of the network of enterprises it is part of. These can include information, money, manpower, and goods etc. This leads to a double level of complexity: one level is […]
Network of Networks: Avoiding Catastrophe Through a Systemic Vision of Enterprises
We’re back for 2012, kicking off with a look at the ‘too big to fail’ fallacy from a scientific point of view this week. We’ll be following this up with a series on why people find it so hard to change, and a response to ‘No Fear’ author Pekka A. Vilijakainen and his invitation to […]
Can Ecosystems Show How to Fix the Euro?
This post, by Dr. Giovanni Siepe, is our last before the holidays. We wish you all a very happy holiday season, and we’ll be back in 2012! In an article by Debora MacKenzie in the New Scientist magazine entitled ‘Can Ecosystems Show How to Fix the Euro?’, the eurozone is analyzed as a complex networked […]
Beyond the Brooklyn Bridge – the new economics
The NYC General Assembly are angry. Hundreds of them were recently arrested on Brooklyn Bridge as they protested on behalf of all those who feel that “corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments.” It’s not surprising they are protesting. We live in in a world where financial […]
