Quotes About Systems

W. Edwards Deming—that arguably, over 90 percent of problems are due to bad systems, not bad people. However, Greenleaf correctly points out that people are the programmers.

That is why Russian penetration of the political systems of the United States and Europe has been so effective. It has exploited the truly dangerous fissures in Western society, which are not based on class, as the Marxists wanted to believe, but on tribe and culture.

Miss Rand clearly states that there are only two choices in the construction of political systems: a system that respects individual rights—or all those systems which violate them.

The reason so many talented people are poor is because they focus on building a better hamburger and know little to nothing about business systems.

Triangles are ubiquitous and automatic in emotional systems. They are considered, in Bowen family systems theory, to be the molecule, or basic building block of any system of people—be it the family, an organization, or society itself. The goal is not how to get out of them, however, but rather how to manage oneself in and through them.

It would seem that it is in some kind of combination of top-down and bottom-up organization that we must expect to find the most successful AI systems.

The letters between the two philosophers were cordial, although Spinoza at first distrusted Leibniz, who in turn referred to him privately as 'a Jew expelled from the synagogue for his monstrous opinions'. Since the fundamental assumptions behind their two systems are profoundly similar, it is perhaps not surprising that the two philosophers – whose conclusions are wholly opposed – should have treated each other with a certain caution.

Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value. Though I listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short, to depreciate love, I persist, I know, I know, but all the same...

He also saw human nature as insatiably curious and reserved his highest praise for minds that created "schemes or systems of truth."11

By 1900, the nation's railroads were consolidated into six huge systems controlled by Wall Street bankers, principally J. P. Morgan

foreign legal systems. So I made

Learning is relatively easy when the link between cause and effect is clear. But complex systems often sever that connection: causes remote from effects, solutions detached from problems, and feedback delayed or misleading (Cyert and March, 1963; Senge, 1990).

Teams often get launched in a vacuum, with little or no training or support, no changes in the design of their work, and no new systems like e-mail to help communication between teams. Frustrations mount, and people wind up in endless meetings trying to figure out why they are a team and what they are expected to do.

Jakob Bernoulli had shown that through mathematical analysis one could learn how the inner hidden probabilities that underlie natural systems are reflected in the data those systems produce.

complex systems (among which I count our lives) we should expect that minor factors we can usually ignore will by chance sometimes cause major incidents.8

The branch of philosophy that applies ethics to social questions is politics, which studies the nature of social systems and the proper functions of government.

This country is founded on a certain tension." He pressed his fists against each other. "There is a dualism inherent in democracy—opposing forces pushing against each other, always. Culture clashes. Different belief systems. All coming together to create this country. But this balance takes a great deal of energy—and, as I've said, spirits are attracted to energy.

Look, I can surely say by now that I've got the antibodies to communism inside me. But when I think of consumer society, with all its tragedies, I wonder which of the two systems is better.

The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy.

Another interesting way in which the mechanistic worldview is being transcended is through discoveries having to do with chaos theory. It seems that systems of various kinds often exist in a state of chaos or, as they say, "on the edge of chaos," and then suddenly and unpredictably there emerges something called a "strange attractor" that rearranges the chaos into some new order.

So far, the only people who've made money from trading systems are their sellers.

There are good trading systems out there, but they have to be monitored and adjusted using individual judgment. You have to stay on the ball—you cannot abdicate responsibility for your success to a mechanical system.

Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows.

Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve. — A stitch in time saves nine.