March 3, 2025
A Book about systems thinking by Donella Meadows
Reflections and Random Thoughts
I’m afraid I didn’t take much of value from this read. Her political agenda was woven throughout, and I found it more distracting than enlightening.
Quotes from the Book
“In fact, we don’t talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about. Our perspectives on the world depend on the interaction of our nervous system and our language—both act as filters through which we perceive our world.”
This next quote, according to Amazon, was highlighted by over 15,000 Kindle readers;
“Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.”
Key Take-Aways
Something Actionable
What Everyone Else Thinks
4.6 out of 5 Stars on Amazon.
A Top 5 Star Review
There are a few books that encapsulate a way of thinking so simply, so clearly and so compellingly that I find myself giving little kisses of delight to the cover. I read this on a Kindle, so this resulted in quite a lot of smudging. (this was a long review so you can read the rest here if you are interested)
A Top 1 Star Review
I got this book because we develop systems for patient compliance, the reviews were high, and I was eager to learn from such an expert of high acclaim. In fact, the book is a superficial collection of high-level ideas with little to no added value or insight. The book is a spectacular example of what Feynman called “cargo science”. Do meaningful, not just quantifiable. Indeed. The book is also heavily influenced by the author’s environmental agenda, which should be disturbing to anyone with an engineering or physics education used to system analysis. Read Bellman’s classic “Adaptive Control Processes – A guided tour” for real thought and insights on systems.
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