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Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex World | 
| Author: Yaneer Bar-yam
Publisher: Knowledge Press
Category: Book
Buy New: $28.95
New (5) Used (4) from $13.50
Rating:  10 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 306
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0965632822
Dewey Decimal Number: 530
EAN: 9780965632829
ASIN: 0965632822
Publication Date: May 30, 2005
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
"Making Things Work" describes how the concepts of complex systems can help in solving the complex problems facing us today. In easy to understand language, this book explains how effectively organizing people can solve complex problems in: healthcare education military conflict ethnic violence and terrorism third world development. When a problem is highly complex one person cannot solve it alone, but organizations of people can, if they know how to work together. Making Things Work explains why traditional organizations and traditional forms of control and planning are not effective for addressing these tasks. It draws on basic insights from complex systems research - emergence, complexity, patterns, networks and evolution to explain how effective teams form through cooperation and competition, and how to make non-hierarchical organizations effective at their tasks. Everyone can take away something from the practical and instructive problem-solving approach described in this book. Praise for Making Things Work: "Yaneer Bar-Yam is among the world's two or three best writers on complexity. In Making Things Work, he homes in on a handful of complexity theory's most important ideas, such as emergence, interdependence, scale, networks, and evolution. With beautifully clear writing and examples, he explains what these ideas mean in the context of complexity theory, and he shows why they're important to understanding the world around us. Making Things Work is a superb introduction to complexity theory-suitable for students, policymakers, and the educated lay public. Yaneer Bar-Yam is one of few specialists able to make complexity simple." -Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of "The Ingenuity Gap," Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, at the University of Toronto.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
Brilliant! April 13, 2008
Chander Chawla
If you want to understand how the world around you is functioning, you only need to read this book. It will provide you foundation/concepts which are universal i.e. apply to everything.
indispensable October 8, 2007
J. Carlos Aguado (Barcelona, Spain)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful book, essential in the complex world we live in. It explains how to apply insight from one of the newest branches of science, complexity, to every day problems. Very illuminating.
Nevertheless, its final part on ethnic violence, terrorism and global conflicts is nothing but disappointing. Bar-Yam fails to look at one of the world's most complex and urgent problems with the same cold intelligence he applies to engineering design. Maybe still under the 9/11 trauma, he seems to see it as a problem of Muslims against Christians and only suggests that maybe we should maintain frontiers between "them" and "us". The solution has to be transparency and replicating the best traits of every culture. For instance, community values from Islam, for instance, respect to human rights from Western culture. But, if in a "war against terrorism" we agree to forget about human rights, what is left?
MACRO CHALLENGES OF OUR COMPLEX WORLD & ORGANIZATIONS. July 19, 2005
Gerry Stern (Culver City, CA United States)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book is bound to please anyone who wants to grapple with the complexity of today's world and organizations, and is interested in the truly big picture and issues.
Part I explains concepts central to complex systems, such as: parts, wholes and relationships; patterns; networks and collective memory; possibilities; and evolution. The second and major part of the book focuses on how we can apply complex systems ideas to help solve such major real-world challenges as: military warfare and conflict; health care (the system and errors); learning and the educational system; international development; enlightened evolutionary engineering; and global control, ethnic violence and terrorism. The first hurdle is to comprehend these problems using our knowledge of complex systems and then begin to address them using a complex systems framework.
The book is intellectually refreshing and bold. Its content is expansive, enlightening, and mind-stimulating.
Complexity demystified March 16, 2005
John McGuirl (RI, USA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
In "Making Things Work" Yaneer provides the reader with an excellent, non-technical discussion of some of the more important concepts in Complexity science. Like other successful popularizers of science such as Carl Sagan, Yaneer has a gift for explaining difficult subjects in a way that everyone can understand. He then shows how these concepts can (and should) be used to address real-world problems such as the health-care crisis and education. It should be required reading for policy-makers and business leaders.
For a more technical treatment, I'd recommend Yaneer's earlier book or better yet, take a course at NECSI.
Great applications! February 1, 2005
Cameran Young (Cambridge, MA)
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
"Making Things Work" provides a great background into the study of complex systems (something that I knew very little about beforehand) and then continues on to apply those concepts and models to real world examples. The examples are easy to follow and all make perfect sense. This book certainly provides many useful problem-solving lifestyle changes
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