Q: What is your next book going to be about Bill?
Hmmm...why does anybody assume that there will be a "next book?" When I finished writing Strategic Navigation, I thought that I'd said all I had to say. Then three years later, my publisher persuaded me to write a "second edition" of Goldratt's Theory of Constraints, which turned out to be so different from the original version that it warranted a new title.
When that happened, I had been gradually collecting the research material for "the next book." I have a 3-cubic-foot book box nearly filled with research papers, books, and a rough outline. My intention is to write (eventually) a book on systems thinking and the systems approach to management. It will be far more than Senge's The Fifth Discipline, though it will incorporate some of that.
Most people don't realize that systems thinking/management predated Senge by a couple of decades, dating back to Churchman's and Checkland's writings about it in the 1960s, and E.S. Quade's work on systems analysis for the Rand Corporation. I got my masters degree in systems management from the University of Southern California through a program that had been conceived in 1964. I later taught for seven years in that same program. Even that program, though it aspired to be a "whole systems" wrap-around, had to make do with piecemeal, patchwork subjects-topics-tools all stitched together under the rubric of "systems management." There was no single text book that addressed the overall philosophy of managing systems, rather than just gluing together optimized processes.
So my magnum opus, which I would like to start on sometime next year, will be that wrap-around text book on systems thinking/management. I want to try to integrate such diverse thinkers as Kuhn, Diamond, Argyris, Kotter, Ackoff, Churchman, Checkland, Senge, Boyd, etc., and---yes---Goldratt. I want to try to create a kind of "unified field theory" on understanding systems. All that said, this is a big undertaking, and I may not get to it next year---or maybe not ever. Before I do anything else, Eli Schragenheim and I have to finish our sequel to Manufacturing at Warp Speed (tentatively titled Supply Chain Fulfillment at Warp Speed), which is due to our publisher in mid-2008.
Clarke: Great, I'll have plenty of new questions when both of these questions come out.
