A very interesting book that is about more than just systems analysis. As an introduction to the subject it has a little bit of math, a little bit of engineering, and quite a bit of philosophy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The book gives constructive advice on analyzing situations and pulling apart complex systems and getting at what makes them work. The advice is aimed at non-technical readers (like me!) so there was a lot I could take away from this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can see that there must be a lot of interest in this topic in the field of economics – people analyzing why Company A is getting ahead while Company B might not be worth investing in. The economics part of the book was the least interesting to me, maybe it just went a little too deep and I\u2019m more comfortable in the kiddie pool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also thought that considering the book was written way back in 2003 it contains a lot of insight that is applicable to the current political situation in the USA and around the world. That speaks to how fundamental the author\u2019s ideas are. She writes with a lot of humility too – the systems analyst must be content with knowing that they can never know everything about a system, they can never compute every variable, they can always be surprised by unexpected events to throw the whole thing off kilter. But that isn\u2019t a reason not to make the effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next I am reading Some Kind of Hero by Ajay Chowdhury and Matthew Field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A very interesting book that is about more than just systems analysis. As an introduction to the subject it has a little bit of math, a little bit of engineering, and quite a bit of philosophy. The book gives constructive advice on analyzing situations and pulling apart complex systems and getting at what makes them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-YU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3776\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}