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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Essential if you lead strategy formation exercises, April 12, 2003
By A Customer
John Sterman has written a superb book that masks the underlying calculus and reveals the capability of causal loop based situation analysis. The examples in the book are absolutely mind-boggling in scale and brilliance with which they are written. The wide applicability of system dynamics is revealed though the large problem spectrum covered in all the chapters of the book. Without needing to run through the software enclosed in the book, one can easily perceive the dependant causation of a specific problem by following the simple rules expained early on in the book for drawing reinforcing and balancing conditions that drive the causes leading to a specific problem being addressed. By focusing on the software (which is enclosed on the CD ROM) to develop a problem solving approach, one has to work hard to create a balanced problem and this is not easily done by merely reading the book. I am considering further training in this aspect to master the topic by taking some more ExecEd courses that John Sterman teaches at MIT Sloan along with Jay Forrester and Peter Senge or even taking the eight week remote learning course offered toward credit at the System Dynamics program at Sloan. I deal with complex IT architectures in my work on a daily basis involving financial, technical and business driven dependencies for Fortune 1000 firms. I use causal looping as taught by John and others at MIT Sloan to understand the path to cut through the complexity and reach an action plan that I can recommend to my clients. The book has helped me tremendously in my work in the last few months that I have been reading it on airplane trips between my office and customer offices. For a busy consultant, this is a tremendously useful way to spend flight time. I would give it 5 stars for the content except that the book is not available in e-Book format, forcing me to carry it with me in my laptop bag on flights(its a heavy tome at 900 + pages) and the software on the CD-ROM is not updated to the most current version one can download from the Vensim website nor can it be used for commercial purposes.
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