Fall reading. Mostly not finished. Some jewels: Senge, Argyris, Porter.
Link: Amazon
Author: Peter Senge
Summary: Systems can be complex, complicated, or both. Complex systems feature “dynamic” – i.e., temporal – complexity. Complicated systems feature “detail” complexity. Feedback, delay, and indirect causality are three of the critical features of complex systems. Other key terms: leverage, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning.
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Link: Amazon
Author: Michael Porter
Summary: tbd. (up to page 50, or so): profits in any given industry are heavily constrained by five structural forces of rivalry: “entry, threat of substitution, bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, and rivalry among current competitors”. These forces often result in industry-specific barriers to entry (and exit). There are three (mostly mutually incompatible) extremes of competitive strategy: cost leadership, differentiation, and focus.
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Link: usacac.army.mil
Author: SAMS Student Text Design Team
Summary: tbd. (up to page 30 or so)
Selected Quotes:
According to the doctrine, “design is a methodology for applying critical and creative thinking to understand, visualize, and describe complex, ill-structured problems and develop approaches to solve them.” – FM 5-0 (pg. 10)
The five pillars of design education at SAMS are history, theory, doctrine, philosophy, and practice. (pg. 28)
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Link: www.history.army.mil
Author: Charles E. Kirkpatrick
Summary: tbd.
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Link: Amazon
Author: Donald A Schön
Summary: tbd. (The basic blurb: for most professionals, effectiveness depends heavily on tacit knowledge and “reflection-in-action”.)
See also:
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Link: Amazon
Author: Donald A Schön
Summary: tbd. “Where do professionals come from?”
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Link: Amazon
Author: Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schön
Summary: Argyris and Schön think that many people in our society tacitly learn theories in order to cope with their environment but that, for structural reasons, their theories often are often “self-sealing” rather than testable and subject to incongruence (espoused theories and theories-in-use differ), incompatibility (control objectives conflict / configuration space is disconnected), ineffectiveness (objectives not met), and loss of value (inappropriate objectives are met). They suggest a paradoxical but (according to them) effective alternate path based on maximizing learning via valid information, free and informed choice, and internal commitment.
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Link: Amazon
Author: Joseph LeDoux
Summary: tbd.
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Link: Amazon
Author: Barbara Pease and Allan Pease
Summary: People often express their emotional state via pose and gesture clusters. (Note: the science writing here is mostly crap but the photos and illustrations are, mostly, convincing.)