As a customer support specialist for a systems engineering company, you have to have a special mix of skills—technical aptitude, a strong people side, and, critically, persistence—an ability to persevere and stay with a problem until you reach a solution. Laszlo Kecskes appears to have all three in spades. His …

Why is it that we as engineers always seem to think we never have enough of us in product development? Or that we never have enough time? I believe it starts with insufficient use of a systems engineering approach. We don’t spend enough time in determining our unknowns in the …

One of the most important—and often overlooked—aspects of good systems engineering is first principles thinking. In an excellent article on first principles thinking in his Farnam Street blog, Shane Parrish discusses first principles thinking in the context of Julia Child’s French cooking. Arguing that what made her extraordinary television show …

This is the third and final post of three blog posts about systems engineering for rapid innovation in a hyper-dynamic world. The first post introduced the subject; the second post discussed how to address each of the three systems—the system-of-interest, the enterprise system, and the external system—from the standpoint of …