Category: Articles
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Stewardship: A New Employment Covenant
The latest casualty of the changes sweeping through corporate America is the lifetime employment contract — the implicit agreement that provided employees with economic…
Lessons in Systems Thinking: A Tale from the Land of Middle Health
Microtown, a small community deep within the Land of Middle Health, isn’t much different from other towns. Its citizens are young and old, rich…
Charting a Corporate Learning Strategy
Managers in many companies slay are struggling with one basic question: How do you actually create a learning organization? While the five disciplines described…
Entry Points to Modeling: Listening for “Dilemmas”
One of the biggest contributions that systems thinking can make is to help managers build theories about why things happen the way they do.
Shifting the Burden Revisited: Turtles All the Way Down
There is an old story about a student who asked his master, “Teacher, what holds up the world?” The teacher paused for a moment…
Clarifying Variables: Actual, Perceived, and Desired
One of the primary benefits of modeling with systems tools—whether causal loops or computer simulations—is the intense discussion it can generate around important variables…
ABC: Initiating Large-Scale Change at Chrysler
When Chrysler adopted activity-based costing (ABC) in 1991, the decision rep; resented more than a simple accounting change. The shift to ABC challenged many…
Confronting the Tension Between Learning and Performance
Few readers would disagree with the suggestion that those who develop and exercise a greater capacity to learn are likely to outperform those less…
Accountability Leadership
What comes to mind when you hear the word “accountability”? If it is something along the lines of “who gets the blame,” “being called…
The Potential of Talking and the Challenge of Listening
In December 2002, the entire world was arguing about what to do about Iraq. There were two sides to the argument. On one side,…