On our morning road bike ride, the conversation came around to Systems. Some of our group are like me - a techie - a few others are business people in finance and ops. The topic was what's a system and how does that notion impact or world. The retailer in the group had a notion of a system - grocery stores are systems that manage the entire supply chain from field to basket.
Here's my reading list that has served me well for those interested in Systems
- Systems Engineering: Coping with Complexity, Richard Stevens, Peter Brook, Ken Jackson, Stuart Arnold
- The Art of Systems Architecting, Mark Maier and Eberhardt Rechtin
- Systems Thinking: Coping with 21st Century Problems, John Boardman and Brian Sauser
- Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail, John Gall
- The Art of Modeling Dynamic Systems: Forecasting for Chaos, Randomness and Determinism, Foster Morrison
- Systems Thinking: Building Maps for Worlds of Systems, John Boardman and Brian Sauser
- The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small, John Gall
- A Primer for Model-Based Systems Engineering, 2nd Edition, David Long and Zane Scott
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella Meadows
These are all actionable outcomes books.
Systems of information-feedback control are fundamental to all life and human endeavor, from the slow pace of biological evolution to the launching the latest space satellite ... Everything we do as individuals, as an industry, or as a society is done in the context of an information-feedback system. - Jay W. Forrester
