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Meltdown
Book

Meltdown

What Plane Crashes, Oil Spills, and Dumb Business Decisions Can Teach Us About How to Succeed at Work and at Home

Penguin Press, 2018 подробнее...


Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Eye Opening
  • Concrete Examples
  • Engaging

Recommendation

Former derivatives trader Chris Clearfield and management professor András Tilcsik assess modern systems’ frightening potential for failure, such as nuclear reactor meltdowns, transportation disasters, poor water quality and hacked defibrillators. They delve into what went wrong in various crises without being too technical. They spend two-thirds of this coherent, well-organized argument on research-backed strategies for addressing the risk of failure. A nuclear meltdown might not seem related to daily life, but these failure-prevention strategies apply to many issues. The authors provide tools for staving off disaster in complex environments.

Take-Aways

  • Complexity makes modern systems more useful yet more vulnerable to catastrophic failure.
  • Acknowledging small problems and learning from them helps you discover larger threats.
  • “Tight coupling” – a situation where the margin for error is slim – can make small problems in complex systems spiral out of control.

About the Authors

Former stock trader Chris Clearfield writes about complexity and failure for general and academic publications. University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management professor András Tilcsik teaches organizational failure and disaster risk management.


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