The Systems Thinker – A Lifetime of Systems Thinking - The Systems Thinker

When science divides reality up into disciplinary parts and deals with them separately, it reveals a lack of understanding of reality as a whole, as a system.

Profit is to a corporation as oxygen is to a human being: necessary for existence, not the reason for it

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.

The perceived need to learn something new is inversely proportional to the rank of a manager. Those at the top feel obliged to pretend to omniscience, and therefore refuse to learn anything new even if the cost of doing so is success.

Managers fail to diagnose the failures of the fads they adopt; they do not understand them.

Corporations tend to collect activities that they do not have the competence or even the inclination to run well.

Identifying and defining the ways we can control the future: vertical integration, horizontal integration, cooperation, incentives, and responsiveness.

Mistakes are of two types: commission (doing what should not have been done) and omission (not doing what should have been done). 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.

Identifying and defining the hierarchy of mental content, which, in order of increasing value, are: data, information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. However, the educational system and most managers allocate time to the acquisition of these things that is inversely proportional to their importance.