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 writes on leadership, governance, and the conditions that determine whether either is practised well. His work draws on classical sources, organisational scholarship, and two decades inside the institutions he writes about.
The fraud doesn't end at appointment—it must be maintained. The people best placed to name it are the people whose interests depend on not naming it. Part two of two on who keeps the corporate con moving, and the one question that stops it.
Boards keep hiring the executive who says yes. An entire market—search, remuneration, coaching, consulting—now manufactures the corporate saviour and has no mechanism for telling the truth about what he can deliver. Part one of two on the fraud that begins at appointment.
The disruption industry treats breaking things as proof of seriousness. Edmund Burke—reformer, not reactionary—offered a corrective two centuries ago: most transformation programmes destroy more than they build. The best leaders renovate, not demolish.
Every organisation has one. Twelve boxes, each promising to reduce leadership to something measurable and trainable. The framework is everywhere—and it is wrong in a more fundamental sense than you might think.
