Category: Articles
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Many Cyclical Markets Share Common Underlying Structure
Pork production, engineering student enrollments, the oil tanker industry, real estate. What do they all have in common? They experience “boom and bust” cycles at…
Learning Organizations: From Invention to Innovation
“Forget your old, tired ideas about leadership. The most successful corporation of the 1990s will be something called a learning organization,” intoned a recent Fortune…
Drifting Goals: The “Boiled Frog” Syndrome
It’s becoming an old story in the systems thinking field: If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, he will immediately hop…
Fixes That Fail: Oiling the Squeaky Wheel—Again and Again . . .
How many times have you heard the saying “the squeaky wheel gets the oil?” Most people agree that whoever or whatever makes the most “noise”…
Scenario-Based Planning: Managing by Foresight
In the early 1980s, Royal Dutch/ Shell’s planning group uncovered some startling statistics: one-third of the companies listed in the Fortune 500 in 1970 had…
ithink®: The Visual Thinking Tool
We live in an age of spreadsheets. From tracking expenses to projecting future revenue streams, spreadsheet software packages have become an invaluable tool for many…
Not All Recessions Are Created Equal
Last month, the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed what most businesses have known for some time—the United States economy is in a recession. But…
S-shaped Growth and the Law of Diminishing Returns
Most of us are familiar with the story of Sir Isaac Newton sitting underneath an apple tree and “discovering” the law of gravity when he…
Delays: Accumulators in Disguise
Imagine a new manager at a beef packaging plant who knows nothing about the birthing process of calves. On the first day his workers show…