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  …that the greatest prosperity can exist only as the result of the greatest possible productivity of the men and machines of the establishments— that is, when each man and each machine are turning out the largest possible output. — The Principles of Scientific Management , by Frederick Taylor, 1911. The 20th century was a century of economic growth and technological development never seen before in the history of humanity. A significant part of the credit for this has to go to Frederick Taylor, whose book The Principles of Scientific Management, was published in 1911. Taylor laid down the basic principles of mass production. The ideas worked well for many years, but there were hidden problems. One thing that happened, because the idea was that each worker and each machine should produce as much as possible as much of the time as possible, was that parts tended to pile up, everywhere. Different people, and different machines, doing different things, produce things at different rat...

This is a draft version of a section in Tempo 2.0. Please do comment. Even simple systems can be difficult to understand. It is not because systems are inherently difficult to wrap your head around. The problem is our brains are trained the wrong way. Fortunately, it is not all that difficult to re-learn. When we do that, many problems that have looked utterly incomprehensible before, are suddenly fairly easy to understand. Doing something about them may still be difficult, but at least we have got a start. For starters, we will define what a system is: A system is a set of connected parts, real or abstract, that form an integrated whole. Systems have some interesting properties. For example: Systems consists of parts, that are also systems. Systems always belong to larger systems. Systems have properties that do not exist when you examine the parts separately. You cannot understand a system just by studying the parts. When you do something with a part of a system, other parts will nea...

To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately. — Dr. Russel Ackoff Companies and other organizations are systems. All systems have some properties in common. As you will soon see, these properties can be counter-intuitive. If we rely only on intuition, we will make the wrong decision, even when we have all the information we need to make better ones. The Monty Hall problem We are used to solve problems through analysis. To analyze means to split a problem into parts, and trying to understand the whole by understanding each part separately. The idea is that understanding the parts enables us to understand the whole. This way of viewing the world is called reductionism , and it has been the dominating way of viewing the world in Western culture for hundreds of years. Analysis is indeed a powerful tool, but it has limits. When we try to understand a system by examining its parts, we loose the full pictu...

  This is the second draft chapter in Tempo 2.0 . Link to the previous chapter . “We must be able to examine the world from a number of perspectives so that we can generate mental images or impressions that correspond to that world.” — The Strategic Game of ? and ? , by Col. John Boyd There are lots of books about business strategy. If you look closely at them, you will find that they are about many different things. Tempo 2.0 isn’t just about strategy, but strategy is an important part. Therefore, it is important to define what strategy means in this book. Strategic Navigation defines strategy likes this: A strategy is the answer to the question: What is my ultimate objective, and what intermediate objectives do I need to achieve in order to achieve my ultimate objective? 1 Thus, a strategy is a set of linked objectives, but that alone won’t get us far. If we want things to happen, we also need to do things in a purposeful manner. For that, we use tactics : A tactic i...