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

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.

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.

The most valuable and least replaceable resource is time.

you cannot learn from my mistakes, only from your own. I want to encourage, not discourage, your making your own.

I have no interest in forecasting the future, only in creating it by acting appropriately in the present.

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

Science, I believe, consists of the search for similarities among things that are apparently different; the humanities consist of the search for differences among things that are apparently similar. Science and the humanities are the head and tail of reality—viewable separately, but not separable. It is for this reason that I have come to refer to ... See more

First, disciplines do not constitute different parts of reality; they are different aspects of reality, different points of view. Any part of reality can be viewed from any of these aspects. The whole can be understood only by viewing it from all the perspectives simultaneously.

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.