The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.

A selection of quotes from Gerald Weinberg, a great pioneer in systems thinking.

A system is never finished being developed until it ceases to be used.

Asking for efficiency and adaptability in the same program is like asking for a beautiful and modest wife. Although beauty and modesty have been known to occur in the same woman, we'll probably have to settle for one or the other. At least that's better than neither.

Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.

The generalist, is like the fox, who knows many things. Just as anthropologists learn to live in many cultures, without rifles, so do certain scientists manage to adapt comfortably to the paradigms of several disciplines. How do they do it? When questioned, these generalists always express an inner faith in the unity of science. They, too, carry a single paradigm, but it is one taken from a much higher vantage point, one from which the paradigms of the different disciplines are seen to be very much alike, though often obscured by special language.

The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.

Things are the way they are because they got that way.

If you cannot manage yourself, you have no business managing others.