Bertrand Russell On Systems Thinking

I love when non-business thinkers give great advice the really is useful for a business. Here’s a lecture that talks about systems and people. A sucky system can really bring a company down. It’s a vicious cycle: When the system is out of date, people have to circumvent it, and they tend to not like systems they have to work around.

Good old Berty nails it in this quote.

Throughout history, as I suggested earlier in this series, there has been a fluctuation between periods of excessive anarchy and periods of too strict governmental control. In our day, except as yet in the matter of world government, there has been too much tendency towards authority, and too little care for the preservation of initiative. Men in control of vast organizations have tended to be too abstract in their outlook, to forget what actual human beings are like and to try to fit men to systems rather than systems to men.

Here’s the full lecture.