In the summer of 1928 a young medical researcher left his London lab to go on holiday. He was studying the staphylococci bacilli that are responsible for a number of nasty infections including septicemia. As a part of his research he cultivated the bacteria in cultures grown in Petri dishes. …

The system view is critical to understanding and managing any system. While this seems obvious to the point of triviality, it carries some subtleties for leaders that are not so obvious. Subtleties that are important to the effective management of systems. As a beginning point, it is appropriate to lift …

There is much research leading to many possible techniques for improving the processes by which we make complex decisions. One of the biggest challenges facing systems engineers is that of making choices from among a number of alternatives based upon multiple criteria. Often such decisions need to involve groups. Sometimes …

One of the fundamental concepts of systems engineering is that in any systems design process there are always three systems to be considered. The first is the obvious system that systems engineers call the system of interest. This is the system under design or transformation – the subject of the …