Author: vienna (Page 3 of 9)

April 14, 2025

A Book About Systemizing Your Business by David Jenyns and Michael E Gerber

Quotes from the Book

“that the primary purpose of SYSTEMology is to create space for the business owner – to systemise the business to the point where you can step away from the day-to-day operations and know with confidence that your business will continue to perform to your standards.”

Housekeeping

I can’t believe I didn’t post about this book back when I read it in August 2024. Systemology by David Jenyns was a quick, easy, and surprisingly impactful read. I’ve long admired Michael E. Gerber and read all his E-Myth books more than 20 years ago—in fact, I bought one of his courses back in the day when they still came in giant binders you had to make room for on your shelf. I wish I’d held onto those.

Reflections and Random Thoughts

Reading Systemology felt like a return to those core ideas from Gerber. What stood out to me most was his emphasis on simplicity. It isn’t about building some massive operation manual or turning it into McDonald’s.

It’s about capturing the minimum viable systems that keep your business running so that things don’t fall apart when you’re not in the room.

Insights

Key Takeaways

Minimum viable systems. For years, I’ve been cranking out long, overly detailed SOPs that no one, including me, could use. Thinking in terms of “just enough to work,” I’m starting instead with outlines (just what, not how) and flowcharts that are actually usable. And by usable, I mean we don’t get glassy-eyed when we try to read them.

You don’t have to systematize everything. This was liberating. Not everything in your business needs a flowchart or checklist. Focus on the 20% of systems that drive 80% of the results. It turns out (according to Jenyns) perfection is not only unnecessary—it’s kind of a trap.  We find this in a lot of discussions of perfectionism, don’t we?

Documenting doesn’t mean doing. Jenyns points out that you can—and should—get others to document what they do. This was a big aha for me. I don’t have to be the creator of every process. I just have to create the container for them to live in and keep the project moving.

You can start small. You don’t need a systems revolution. You need a small win. One system. One process. One chunk of chaos tamed. Then another. And another. This makes systemizing feel doable—even if you’re running in a million directions (as most of us are).

Something Actionable

Just a reminder: my rankings are based on how usable the book was for me—and I’ve put a lot of the concepts from this one into practice.

What Everyone Else Thinks

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Books, Non-fiction

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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