Santa Fe Emergent Engineering 2021: Niall Ferguson
Freeman Dyson famously wrote that “A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.”
Most of what we call #history is the close study of tail events that really are interesting because of the scale of mortality, the spectacular nature of the failure, the nature that disasters are not evenly distributed.
The idea that manmade and natural disasters are the same is brilliantly presented in this cartoon in the North Carolina Health Bulletin in 1919...if it's death tolls you're interested in, there's a lot to be said for this point.
The bureaucratic control mechanisms of the 20th Century turn out to be a disaster multiplier...the US #bureaucracy of today is a bewildering pyramidal structures that I suspect would appal the Founding Fathers if they could see it.
I think if you ask who did best through the #pandemic last year, the answer would be #Taiwan — who used the crisis as an opportunity to build up tech infrastructure to improve the #antifragility of their governance and emergency response.
Dr Winter examines the tensions between leadership and management, the structures that hold organisations together, and the ideas that shape organisational life. His work sits where governance, culture, and strategy converge.
You can compare these techniques in meetings with people who, ironically, are not trying to sabotage the company but think their approach a good way to run effective meetings.
Rage if you will and burn screen time if you like — I simply accept if I want my thoughts to be personal and private then I ought not post them online.
As late as 2015 in Great Britain, Royals who married Catholics were removed from the line of succession, and Prime Ministers avoided disclosing their Catholicism in office.
Today's Russia is pursuing the same aims as in 1946: autarchy for Russia and Russian-dominated adjacent areas by a leader, under pressure from nationalistic backers, who has miscalculated the situation.
