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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
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