ESD
Suggested Reading
Summer
2005
Joseph
M. Sussman
JR East Professor
Professor of Civil & Environmental
Engineering
and Engineering Systems
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
May 23, 2005
Building
on our two-year tradition of an ESD
faculty summer reading list, here
we go for a third year and it’s
rather an eclectic mix, I must admit.
 Vest,
Charles M—Pursuing
the Endless Frontier: Essays on MIT
and the Role of Research Universities,
a book of essays by outgoing MIT president
Charles M Vest, it includes his inaugural
address in 1991 and each of his annual
reports to the faculty. It is an excellent
history of MIT during the Vest years
and covers his thoughts on many issues
facing MIT and research universities
in contemporary society; the need
to develop industrial support without
losing our souls; the ups and downs
of federal support for fundamental
research; innovations as the economic
engine of the US and academia’s
role in generating it—retaining
the US’s technological lead
in global markets; diversity as critical—racial,
gender, and intellectual; systems
and the need for integrative education;
MIT as an international as well as
a national institution; the overlap
group and MIT stand against the DoJ;
OCW; the implications of the IT revolution
for research and education; the environment;
the value of the tenure system; and
lots more.
Anyone
with an interest in MIT would find
this book of value. Further, anyone
with an interest in what it takes
to run a first-class research university
could use this book as a text.
 Gaddis,
John Lewis—Surprise,
Security and the American Experience—Gaddis
is a professor at Yale and this short
book (120 pages) was based on his
Goldman Memorial Lectures at the NY
Public Library in 2002. Stimulated,
of course, by 9/11, he traces America’s
approach to national security from
the inception of the Republic. So
this book is about “grand
strategy”. Gaddis discusses
the three great surprises in US history
with national security implications—The
burning of the White House and the
Capitol by the British in 1814, the
attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese
in 1941 and 9/11 and how these events
shaped US strategy.
The
three principles America has built
security policy around are preemption
– taking care of dangers by
attacking first, unilateralism—not
depending upon others for permission,
and hegemony—being so strong
that no one dares attack. Gaddis points
out that in the modern world that
hegemony depends to an extent on consent
and consent requires that there be
something worse than your hegemony
(the USSR played that negative role
in the Cold War).
Gaddis
says transportation revolution changed
everything in America’s grand
strategy in the first half of the
20th Century--- hegemony in our own
hemisphere wasn’t adequate anymore;
geographic separation no longer worked!
So
why on the ESD list?—well, not
for political reasons, one way or
the other—but rather because
I argue that “grand strategy”
is a form of systems thinking. Read
it and see if you agree.
 Lewis,
Michael—Moneyball—Last
summer, I told Tom Magnanti and the
rest of the MIT baseball Mafia, if
I had the nerve I was going to put
this on the ESD Summer Reading List
in 2005, because while it is a baseball
book, it is also a systems
book. In honor of the Red Sox World
Series, I have included it.
The
book describes Billy Beane’s
approach to baseball at GM of the
Oakland A’s. The A’s have
a record of wins per $ of salary that
is exceptionally good—he finds
players the market undervalues and
pays them small money, getting rid
of people he thinks the market overvalues.
So he said at the beginning of Tejada’s
last year that he was not going try
to sign him, realizing as a small
market team that he couldn’t
meet the market and anyway, he could
spend that $ more efficiently. He
doesn’t believe in batting average
but rather on-base % and slugging
%. No sacrifices—don’t
give away outs. Don’t steal—same
reason. Beane believes the market
overvalues speed and fielding. “Real”
baseball people hate him!
This
is a "systems" book, I argue.
It has ideas like thinking about what
you are really trying to optimize,
the value of solid quantitative analysis--you
can't tell who is a good player by
simply watching them and other ideas.
If you like baseball, this is a must
read.
 Gladwell,
Malcolm—Blink:
The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,
The idea is that “experts”
internalize what they know so that
their first reaction to a situation
is often right. So an art expert spots
a forgery in one glance but can’t
you why he just knows it’s a
fraud. So students who are “experts”
at evaluating how good a teacher a
professor is, look at 15 seconds of
tape of a lecture and their evaluation
based on that time slice correlates
very well with full semester evaluations!
A tennis coach knows when a player
is going to double-fault before the
player hits the ball. The concept
is called “thin-slicing”—getting
a lot of information very quickly.
I think it’s a systems concept—it
takes integrative thinking. The author
wrote “The Tipping Point”;
he is a great science writer drawing
on research results and weaving it
into a compelling story.
Friedman,
Thomas—The
World is Flat; A Brief History of
the Twenty-first Century,
I haven’t had a chance to read
this book, but Dan Hasting recommends
it. It’s by a NY Times columnist
and a well-regarded observer of global
economic issues (The Lexus and the
Olive Tree, for example). Here is
Amazon.com’s review.
Editorial
Reviews
Amazon.com
Thomas L. Friedman is not so much
a futurist, which he is sometimes
called, as a presentist. His aim,
in his new book, The World Is Flat,
as in his earlier, influential Lexus
and the Olive Tree, is not to give
you a speculative preview of the wonders
that are sure to come in your lifetime,
but rather to get you caught up on
the wonders that are already here.
The world isn't going to be flat,
it is flat, which gives Friedman's
breathless narrative much of its urgency,
and which also saves it from the Epcot-style
polyester sheen that futurists--the
optimistic ones at least--are inevitably
prey to.
What
Friedman means by "flat"
is "connected": the lowering
of trade and political barriers and
the exponential technical advances
of the digital revolution have made
it possible to do business, or almost
anything else, instantaneously with
billions of other people across the
planet. This in itself should not
be news to anyone. But the news that
Friedman has to deliver is that just
when we stopped paying attention to
these developments--when the dot-com
bust turned interest away from the
business and technology pages and
when 9/11 and the Iraq War turned
all eyes toward the Middle East--is
when they actually began to accelerate.
Globalization 3.0, as he calls it,
is driven not by major corporations
or giant trade organizations like
the World Bank, but by individuals:
desktop freelancers and innovative
startups all over the world (but especially
in India and China) who can compete--and
win--not just for low-wage manufacturing
and information labor but, increasingly,
for the highest-end research and design
work as well. (He doesn't forget the
"mutant supply chains" like
Al-Qaeda that let the small act big
in more destructive ways.) Friedman
tells his eye-opening story with the
catchy slogans and globe-hopping anecdotes
that readers of his earlier books
and his New York Times columns will
know well, and also with a stern sort
of optimism. He wants to tell you
how exciting this new world is, but
he also wants you to know you're going
to be trampled if you don't keep up
with it. His book is an excellent
place to begin. --Tom Nissley
|
