david.doolin

Read maybe 30%, skimmed most of the remaining, was not able to finish it in detail.

I suspect people who like this book will really, really like it, and people who don't, really won't.

My rating of 3 reflects my point of view coming from the engineering side. That is, I did not feel this book was overly helpful when I was working mostly as an individual contributor. I might well find a reread more useful being more on the management side.

I'm probably in the audience for this book, but I'm finding it hard to rate it accurately as I'm already familiar with most of the material the author covers. However, I did find two things notable:

1. The author calls out Friedman on the “greed is good” theory of corporate operation, that is, maximizing shareholder value being the sole concern of a corporation. I have never believed this myself, and with “corporate personhood” established by the law, it's no surprise a large amount of corporate behavior is sociopathic at best. We imprison people for taking “me first” to its logical conclusion, incorporating should come with more social responsibility, not less. Friedman got a Nobel prize for this notion. The author takes Friedman to task, and in my opinion rightly so.

2. I feel the author was unduly harsh on Jack Welch. This may be because I'm currently reading Welch's “Winning,” and can see the mismatch between what Welch writes and how it's taken. For example, Welch's description of stack ranking (differentiation) does not square with what I've read about it, nor what I've experienced directly by way of family working for GE during Welch's tenure. Specifically, Welch spends a lot of words advocating for the middle 70%. That part isn't much discussed by the author, or other authors, and certainly not executed on in my experience. The irony is that Welch and the author are much more closely aligned on people development than the author writes.

This collection of writings provides a basic understanding of systems thinking, starting from first principles. It's referenced in a number of management and engineering books I've read, and references in blog posts are starting to appear more frequently.

One thing to understand about systems thinking is that it's really, really hard to get right in complex systems, and especially when people form an integral component of the system.

Fast read, but very little exploration useful for applying Boyd's concepts. The big take home for me: “Do your homework.”