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Tag: systems thinking
Management Books
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Ackoff's Best: Timeless Observations on the Life of Business
by
Russell L. Ackoff
From managing teams, maximizing the effectiveness of information systems, and problem solving, to creativity, crime, and the role of the corporation in a democratic society, these writings are a cornucopia of insights, observations, and powerful lessons that will help you improve the effectiveness of your organization.
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Scoring a Whole in One:
by
Ed Baker
A short book that is very easy to read and more importantly packed with valuable insight. Dr. Baker does a great job of tying systems thinking to real life examples. Dr. Baker was a long time associate of Dr. Deming.
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Scoring a Whole in One:
by
Ed Baker
A short book that is very easy to read and more importantly packed with valuable insight. Dr. Baker does a great job of tying systems thinking to real life examples. Dr. Baker was a long time associate of Dr. Deming.
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Systems Thinking for Curious Managers: with 40 New Management f-Laws
by
Russell L. Ackoff, Herbert J. Addison, Jamshid Gharajedaghi
Finished just before Professor Ackoff's death late in 2009, Systems Thinking for Curious Managers opens the door to a joined up way of thinking about things that has profoundly influenced thinkers and doers in the fields of business, politics, economics, biology, psychology.
Although Systems Thinking was 'invented' early in the 20th century, even Peter Senge's best-selling "The Fifth Discipline" (Systems Thinking is the fifth discipline) failed to popularize the term. But now, in business and academia, in the public sector and in the search for solutions to the environmental problems we face, Systems Thinking is being talked about everywhere.
This timely book presents 40 more of Russ Ackoff's famously witty and incisive f-Laws (or flaws) of business - following on from his 2007 collection "Management f-Laws". All those in this collection are new and previously unpublished. Andrew Carey's extended introduction ties these f-Laws into the rest of Ackoff's work and gives the reader new to Systems Thinking a practical guide to the implications of Systems Thinking for organisations and managers.
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Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less
by
Sam Carpenter
"As a matter of policy, everyone in the organization will execute each perfected system in the same exact sequence every single time – yet everyone understands that if a system can be improved, adjustment will be made instantly. This is 'working the system.' The key is this (and this is the heart of the new perspective): Focus on the systems that create the results, not on the bad results that occur due to unmanaged systems."
Management Articles
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Small Business Guidebook to Quality Management
The aim of this guidebook is to help small businesses make the transition to a quality culture. While the focus of the guidebook is small businesses the information is helpful to anyone transforming and continually improving their organization.
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Dee Hock on Organizations
by
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Dee Hock
"An organization's success has enormously more to do with clarity of a shared purpose, common principles and strength of belief in them than to assets, expertise, operating ability, or management competence, important as they may be."
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A Different Perspective on Quality: Bringing Management to Life
by
H. Thomas Johnson
Presentation at The Deming Institute. "We truly honor the legacy of Edwards Deming and Gregory Bateson if we begin to recognize that our business and economic organizations should be viewed as life systems, not mechanical systems, and begin to act accordingly. It is time to see these organizations as more than mechanical systems that serve only as instruments of conscious human purpose that we can describe with metaphors from life systems--they are in fact life systems..."
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The Next 25 Years in Statistics
by
William Hill, William G. Hunter
(with contributions by Joseph W. Duncan, A. Blanton Godfrey, Brian L. Joiner, Gary C. McDonald, Charles G. Pfeifer, Donald W. Marquardt, and Ronald D. Snee). A transformation of the American style of management has already begun; in order for it to succee
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Breaking Down the Walls
by
Craig Cochran
"With process orientation, organizations think in terms of integrated processes rather than a confederation of functional departments." Originally published in Quality Digest.
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Dr. Demings 1950 Lecture to Japanese Top Management
"In 1950, Dr. Deming gave a lecture to 80% of the top management people in Japan. What follows is a English translation of the original Japanese transcript. John Dowd made this happen a few years back and has agreed to share it with the Deming Community."
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A Day with Dr. Russel L. Ackoff
by
Russell L. Ackoff
Highly Recommended - Video of presentation to the Chicago-Kent College of Law.
"Among the topics Dr. Ackoff discussed during the workshop were:
- The history and application of systems thinking
- How do social systems allow us to understand and overcome long term problems in today's environment?
- How can you effect change within the system in which you play a role?"
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A Brief Guide to Interactive Planning and Idealized Design
by
Russell L. Ackoff
"Interactive planning is directed at creating the future. It is based on the belief that an organization's future depends at least as much on what it does between now and then, as on what is done to it. Therefore, this type of planning consists of the design of a desirable present and the selection or invention of ways of approximating it as closely as possible. It creates its future by continuously closing the gap between where it is at any moment of time and where it would most like to be."
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Going Lean in Health Care
by
Jim Womack
"Lean principles hold the promise of reducing or eliminating wasted time, money, and energy in health care, creating a system that is efficient, effective, and truly responsive to the needs of patients ? the 'customers' at the heart of it all."
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TPS vs. Lean and the Law of Unintended Consequences
by
Art Smalley
"In every piece of TPS literature from Toyota, this stated aim is mixed in with the twin production principles of Just in Time (make and deliver the right part, in the right amount, at the right time), and Jidoka (build in quality at the process), as well as the notion of continuous improvement by standardization and elimination of waste in all operations to improve quality, cost, productivity, lead-time, safety, morale and other metrics as needed. This clear objective has not substantially changed since the first internal TPS training manual was drafted over thirty years ago."
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Thinking About the Future
by
Russell L. Ackoff
"My preoccupation is with where we would ideally like to be right now. Knowing this, we can act now so as constantly to reduce the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Then, to a large extent, the future is created by what we do now."
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The Role of Leadership in Software Development
by
Mary Poppendieck
"In this 90-minute talk from the Agile2007 conference, Lean software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about 'the matrix problem', alignment, waste cutting, planning
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Scrum-ban
by
Corey Ladas
Great article on lean software development ideas: "One simple technique that brings us much closer to our kanban definition is to set a multitasking limit for individuals. You might have a simple principle like: prefer completing work to starting new work
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Lean Thinking and Management
by
John Hunter
"The biggest thing I think we need to learn from this is that improving management is not easy. The concepts may seem simple but most of us can look around and see much more Dilbert Boss behavior than lean thinking behavior. And the gap between those two types of behavior seems to rise as you go 'up' the organization chart."
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The Trouble with Incentives: They Work
by
Gipsie Ranney
"There may be cases in which incentives work only as intended, but I suspect they are relatively rare. The trouble is that we are usually dealing with complex systems (people and organizations) that may behave not at all like our myths would predict...
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The Relentless Contrarian
by
Peter Drucker
what's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There's no excuse for it. No justification. No explanation. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we'll pay a very nasty price.
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Cost is the spectre haunting health reform
by
Atul Gawande
"For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage. Those gaps have widened to become graves - resulting in an estimated forty-five thousand premature deaths each year..."
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Bring Lean to Your Sales Team
by
Jamie Flinchbaugh
"Another example is experimentation and reflection. By teaching the fundamentals of Plan-Do-Check-Act, the sales team can test out new ideas, messages and techniques with rigor. They can establish a common means by which to experiment, and ultimately to share best practices.
The third step is to work on processes that cross boundaries. Many processes that go into product development, manufacturing or finance begin in sales at some point. These process are often broken, or at least inefficient. Lean can connect them, but it will require collaboration."
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Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
by
Paul Graham
"There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals.
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When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in."
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Blame the System
by Steve LeBlanc - "Once we are free to look at and address where the system has failed us, we can let go of our blame and resentment for our co-workers. I propose that we need blame. We are meaning-seeking creatures and as such, we need to blame someone or something for what went wrong. Blame people and you demoralize them and make them afraid. When you blame the system, no one gets hurt and things gently improve.
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Our job is to improve the system while honoring those who work in and around it. Let’s all just blame the system."
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Create a System That Lets People Take Pride in Their Work
by
John Hunter
"Using the term implies that it one person empowers another person. This is not the correct view. Instead we each play a role within a system. Yes there are constraints on your actions based on the role you are playing. Does a security guard empower the CEO to enter the building?
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You don't need to think about empowering people if you have a system that lets people take pride in what they do. If you think you need to empower staff, instead fix the system that requires you to think they are in need of empowerment."
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How do you know when do to an A3, and when to just solve the problem
by
Tracey Richardson
"If there was a defect that got past an area/department and to the customer, this is unacceptable and should be counter-measured temporary (stop the bleeding) to ensure nothing else 'flows out' as well as finding the permanent countermeasure (using PDCA) (again this is all initiated by the plant manager--they should be responsible at this level and gather the resources necessary, and involving their people to ensure this will not happen again and learn from it for the the next A3)."
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The Equally Important “Respect for People” Principle
by
Bob Emiliani
"The 'Respect for People' principle encompasses all key stakeholders: employees, suppliers, customers, investors, and communities. Thus, rather than representing a single dyad, the 'Respect for People' principle is a multilateral expression of the need for balanced, mutually respectful relationships, cooperation, and co-prosperity with these key stakeholders."
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Performance Reviews Are Obsolete
The CEO of Catapult Systems explains their elimination of the annual performance appraisal. "the most critical flaw of our old process was that the feedback itself was too infrequent and too far removed from the actual behavior to have any measurable impact on employee performance.
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I decided to completely eliminate of our annual performance review process and replace it with a real-time performance feedback dashboard."
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Knowledge workers are the new capitalists
by
Peter Drucker
"knowledge workers are highly mobile within their specialism. They think nothing of moving from one university, one company or one country to another, as long as they stay within the same field of knowledge. There is a lot of talk about trying to restore knowledge workers' loyalty to their employing organisation, but such efforts will get nowhere. Knowledge workers may have an attachment to an organisation and feel comfortable with it, but their primary allegiance is likely to be to their specialised branch of knowledge."
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A Call for Continued Open Standards and Net Neutrality
by Tim Berners-Lee. "The primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth is universality. When you make a link, you can link to anything. That means people must be able to put anything on the Web, no matter what computer they have, software they use or human language they speak and regardless of whether they have a wired or wireless Internet connection. The Web should be usable by people with disabilities. It must work with any form of information, be it a document or a point of data, and information of any quality—from a silly tweet to a scholarly paper. And it should be accessible from any kind of hardware that can connect to the Internet: stationary or mobile, small screen or large."
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The Achilles’ Heel of Agile
by
Jurgen Appelo
"In the case of shared resources, whether it concerns money, space, or system administrators, someone outside of the development teams must keep an eye on long-term sustainability instead of short-term gains by individual teams.
The Tragedy of the Commons is the Achilles’ heel of Agile. It takes management to protect that heel, in order to prevent teams from depleting resources, and crippling the organization."
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Resist your machine thinking!
by
Jeffrey Liker
"To maintain consistent output, one must continually adjust the
system to changing environmental conditions. This is called dynamic
homeostasis in systems thinking, or running to stay in place.
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Maintenance comes from having clearly defined standards, observing
carefully for deviations from those standards, and then developing
and implementing countermeasures to eliminate the deviations."
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Why Lean Programs Fail
by
Jeffrey Liker, Mike Rother
"a large survey conducted by Industry Week in 2007 found that only 2 percent of companies achieved their anticipated results... When we look at lean in this way it is not only a set of techniques for eliminating waste, but a process by which managers as leaders develop people so that desired results can be achieved, again and again. That means coaching people in practicing an improvement kata every day."
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Interview of and by Dr. Ackoff and Dr. Deming
by
Russell L. Ackoff, Clare Crawford-Mason, W. Edwards Deming
Great stuff. The transcript spells Dr. Ackoff's name wrong (Akoff). They discuss the important of viewing organizations as systems and a fair amount of time on the problems with business school education in the USA. And they touch on a huge number of management topics. Dr. Deming "When one understands who depends on me, then I may take joy in my work." Dr. Ackoff "If there isn't join in work, you won't get productivity, and you won't get quality."
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Stop Ignoring the Stalwart Worker
"Perhaps the defining characteristic of Stalwarts is their aversion to calling attention to themselves — even when they need to. They are like the proverbial wheel that never squeaks — and, consequently, gets no grease.
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The other signature trait of Stalwarts is their deep loyalty to the organization. They are responsible and care deeply about the organization's values, and they generally steer clear of risk. Stalwarts are intrinsically motivated by the service they can render for the good of the organization, and they let their own careers take a backseat to the company's well-being. They feel that they have accomplished something if the company is running like a well-oiled machine."
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Systems Thinking and the Three Musketeers - Deming's SoPK
"So too will organizations move successfully into the future, through the use of Systems Thinking, by providing a clear aim that is not merely limited to profitability but to optimizing the entire organization, removing the forces that destroy a system, and promoting the positive interactions that create the “All for one, one for all” camaraderie found in the most successful organizations."
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It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings
by
Jason Yip
"It is too easy to confuse effort with work. The stand-up should encourage a focus on moving work through the system in order to achieve our objectives, not encourage pointless activity.
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Post raised obstacles to an Improvement Board. This is a publicly visible whiteboard or chart that identifies raised obstacles and tracks the progress of their resolution. An Improvement Board can be updated outside of stand-ups and serves as a more immediate and perhaps less confronting way to initially raise obstacles."
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How Do We Know What We Know? - Deming’s SoPK Part IV
by
John Hunter
"If we can break from such beliefs that are not useful in modern organizations, we can improve our decisions. Having a Deming-based theory of knowledge will help us break from those beliefs and it will help us be more thoughtful as we learn to question other management beliefs we hold –many of which simply are not useful –or cause harm.
Understanding the theory of knowledge within the context of the Deming’s System for Managing helps us more effectively and consistently learn and improve the processes and systems we work with. "
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Ten Questions with Jeffrey Pfeffer
by
Guy Kawasaki, Jeffrey Pfeffer
Interview by Guy Kawaasaki.
"companies often ignore the interdependence or connections between actions in one part and those in another. So, even as some departments are trying to cut the costs of benefits, others are worried about recruiting and retaining enough qualified people. Maybe the parts should work together.
Third, many companies presume that incentives are the answer to everything, and have a very mechanistic model of human behavior. That is also incorrect."
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How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted
by
John Hunter
"Often when learning about Deming’s ideas on management, lean manufacturing, design of experiments, PDSA… people become excited. They discover new ideas that show great promise to alleviate the troubles they have in their workplace and lead them to better results. But how to actually get their organization to adopt the ideas often confounds them..."
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Dr W. Edwards Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge
"Improvement requires change. Change requires a plan. Such a plan is a prediction – if we follow this plan, we believe that certain benefits will accrue. Learning comes from observing the implementation, and modifying further iterations of the plan accordingly.
Managers in an improving organisation will see themselves as experimenters and as leader of the learning cycle."
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Each necessary, but only jointly sufficient
by
John Allspaw
"for complex systems: there is no root cause.
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Frankly, I think that this tendency to look for singular root causes also comes from how deeply entrenched modern science and engineering is with the tenets of reductionism. So I blame Newton and Descartes.
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In the same way that you shouldn’t ever have root cause 'human error', if you only have a single root cause, you haven’t dug deep enough."
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Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed
by
John Hunter
"The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples and… while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan. With many interactions to test it is far too complex to manually derive an intelligent test plan. A
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Disruptive Innovation
by
Clayton Christensen
Excellent long article (a book chapter) on the topic by the expert.
"Disruptive innovations, in contrast, don’t attempt to bring better products to established customers in existing markets. Rather, they disrupt and redefine that trajectory by introducing products and services that are not as good as currently available products. But disruptive technologies offer other benefits—typically, they are simpler, more convenient, and less expensive products that appeal to new or less-demanding customers.
Once the disruptive product gains a foothold in new or low-end markets, the improvement cycle begins. And because the pace of technological progress outstrips customers’ abilities to use it, the previously not-good-enough technology eventually improves enough to intersect with the needs of more demanding customers."
Management Web Sites and Resources
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W. Edwards Deming Institute
by
W. Edwards Deming
Founded by W. Edwards Deming the institute carries forward his philosophy. The site includes information on the institutes annual conferences and offers newsletters online.
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Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles
by
John Hunter
Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.
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Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog
by
John Hunter
Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...
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Toyota Production System
Site on Toyota.com. "The Toyota Production System (TPS) was established based on two concepts: The first is called 'jidoka'(which can be loosely translated as 'automation with a human touch') which means that when a problem occurs, the equipment stops immediately, preventing defective products from being produced; The second is the concept of 'Just-in-Time,' in which each process produces only what is needed by the next process in a continuous flow."
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Daily Kaizen
by
Lee Fried
Blog by Lee Fried tracking the journey of a world-class health care system as it continuously improves to serve its members. He works for Group Health Cooperative non-profit care system in Seattle, Washington.
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Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections
by
John Hunter
The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life.
The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.
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Benjamin Mitchell's Blog
by
Benjamin Mitchell
"I'm a London-based independent consulting focussed on Systems Thinking, Intervention Theory and Lean / Kanban applied to IT businesses. I am a follower of Ohno, Deming, Seddon and Argyris."
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Not Running a Hospital
by
Paul Levy
Advocate for patient-driven care, eliminating preventable harm, transparency of clinical outcomes, and front-line driven process improvement.
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Thinkovate
Blog discussing Goldratt and systems thinking ideas.