SYSTEMANTICS. THE SYSTEMS BIBLE

So that could easily be the case you know I read this great book decades ago called Systemantics by a man named John Galt and it's a great book very very short tongue in cheek in a way but brilliant and he has a lot of maxims and axioms it's a list of axioms about how you analyze how a system works and one of his axioms which I've never forgotten and has been unbelievably useful to me as an analytic researcher was uh the system does not do what its name says it does and so that when you approach a system you have to look at so if you want to for example figure out what a system does you look at where it spends its money so I learned this when I was working for the Alberta government 30 years ago 40 years ago as a junior analyst

One of my all-time favorite book is "The Systems Bible" by John Gall and one of my favorite lessons from that book is you can't just airdrop a complex system and have it work it's got to have evolved from a simple system and so there's incredible wisdom in Chatham's advice to go very slow in the early days with enterprise software specifically and and reach product maturity that's one example.