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Things Are Not Working Very Well. In Fact, They Never Did.

Trawling my RSS feeds looking for Monday’s links, I came across an interesting review of Systemantics, John Gall’s essay on ‘How Systems Work & Especially How They Fail’ (originally published in 1977 and available online here) .

I’m still processing everything from the Book Net Tech Forum, but in the context of revolutionizing the book industry, this line caught my eye:

“Reformers blame it all on “the system”, and propose new systems that would, they assert, guarantee a brave new world… Everyone, it seems, has his own idea of what the problem is and how it can be corrected. But all agree on one point — that their own system would work very well if only it were universally adopted.”

And now having just read the book’s introduction, which — somewhat remarkably — doesn’t seem to have dated much,  I think I’m going have to read the whole book…

Link (via LinkMachineGo)