Systems Thinking Fuels High-Velocity Organizations - Steven Spear, MIT Engineering

Companies that are in the same industry, use the same basic technology, and address the same market needs can nevertheless exhibit huge disparities in performance. Consider Honda vs. Chrysler, for example, or Intel vs. Advanced Micro Devices. Through a combination of low cost, efficiency, timeliness, and responsiveness, some companies just perform more efficiently. In the course Creating High-Velocity Organizations, an elective offered in MIT's System Design and Management (SDM) program, students examine how and why some companies succeed while others fail through written and video case studies, lectures, and in-class simulations. Examples center on heavy and high-tech manufacturing, new product development and manufacturing, healthcare, and the military.

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A brief history of (ancient) systems thinking « Framework 21 - Daniel Montano

Systems thinking is not new. I have been thinking about its ancient history and so far this is what I have gathered: * 600 B.C. – philosophers used systems thinking to organize their thoughts (e.g. Lao Tze) * 2,700 B.C. – Egyptians, like Imhotep, showed evidence that he was using systems thinking during his roles as architect, physician and engineer in Egypt. * 4,000 B.C. – Cuneiform, a system of writing appears thanks to the need to keep track of multiple economic transactions. * (date pending) – the beginnings of economic (value exchange systems). My assumption here is that value exchange systems were designed by systems thinkers. * (90,000 B.C.) – the beginnings of organized belief systems. You can find traces of these belief systems going back as far as 90,000 B.C. [1]. Rather than being “designed” the earliest belief systems may have emerged at the individual level. People may have organized, and synthesized them into coherent systems.

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