person who does Systems Thinking

my learning process

(see also Product Manager, Greatest Books)

high school

• graphing polynomials
• learning BASIC
  • semi-joining explorers club at Murray Hill Bell Labs - wrote program to calculate pi by starting from a hexagon and doubling number of sides.... it got a few decimals places then reverted back to pi=3, because of float being few bits. Strong learning to "not trust numbers"

college

• got intrigued by japan car industry success, read Theory Z, decided to study industrial engineering.....
  • learn about 'tool switch cost' -> 'batch size" calculations as relates to semi-variable costs and the smell of friction
    • then whacked when read "the Japanese use that calculation, but they worked to reduce their switch cost by 90%, so they could do smaller batches to respond to the market; that was also supported by carrying fewer items/variations"

business school

• a turnarounds class where we had to model the weekly cash-flow balance of a small jewelry store as they faced dropping sales, and considered various scenarios for change - showed how the "numbers trickle down"

startups

• doing a business model, inspired by the jewelry-store experience
  • seeing how useless that business model was at predicting reality
• living through them, always trying to figure out how to use our scant dev resources
• writing code for product, seeing how/whether it gets used
• go on sales calls, try to understand the buyer (and maybe the user)
• try to write copy for a landing page to explain why someone should care about your product
• wondering how your startup will make sales without anyone responsible for that

(more tk)