Note: Voice to text transcriptions are about 90% accurate.
Scott Allen 0:01
Today, on the podcast, I have Willie Donaldson. Willie brings a very interesting perspective. He is an executive, he is a practitioner. And he also teaches at Christopher Newport University teaches leadership. And He is an expert in systems thinking. So that's really the focus of our conversation today is systems thinking as it's applied to leadership. Now, Willie, we literally just met, I'm excited, you have an upcoming issue of the Journal of Leadership Studies, that's gonna have a symposium on the topic of systems thinking. So that's how we got connected. But maybe what we can do is you can tell us a little bit about yourself so that listeners know you. And then we can jump into this, this topic of systems thinking and leadership. How are you, sir?
Willy Donaldson 0:53
Absolutely. I'm great, Scott, great to be with you. And thanks for the time. And it is a delight. And I'll actually correct you if you don't mind, and that the symposium is going to be two issues. We'll talk more about that and why we broke it into two issues and how I thought about doing that with your good friend Tony Middlebrooks. So, we'll hear more about that. But you're absolutely right. I am a non-traditional academic, I am an Associate Professor of Management, and I teach in the business school and in the leadership program, and but I come from 35 years of being a CEO, I, CEO of eight companies, one of which is a publicly-traded company, one was an international joint venture. And, I became a CEO at age 26. And one of the things I knew was that I knew I didn't know what I needed to know. And so I went searching, and every mentor every place, I went, just, you know, really drove home, the need for leadership and great leadership. And so I started in my organizations really digging into what leadership looks like as a practitioner, because much like some of your prior guests have said, you get out there as an academic, and that's not the way it works. And so it's a complex, challenging event.
Scott Allen 2:18
You know, it's the pretty, I always say the pretty blue boxes in the textbook don't seem to stay pretty in blue in the real world. Right?
Willy Donaldson 2:27
Exactly. Exactly. It gets very messy out there, and, and challenging to yourself. And so one of the first things I wanted to do is center myself as a leader, and see if I really understood myself. And then I went and started summarizing that and building it into my corporate universities, how we taught leadership, and thought about leadership in my companies because I just thought it was that important. And one of my seminal moments was going to a terrific event that the American Management Association used to have called the President's Association, shareholder, The Management Course for Presidents, it was only CEOs or division presidents because the world just looks different from that seat. And so they really wanted people to share the experience. So it's really a peer-driven organizational development session. And they, I guess, I was too vocal, they asked me to start teaching that course. And so we spent a lot of time on leadership in that particular session. And the AMA asked me to develop the very first program on leadership that I taught around the country. And that was back in the 90s, the early 90s. And so I've thought a lot about this for a long, long time. And the confluence of systems thinking comes from my father was the director of all of the gas dynamics labs at the forerunner of NASA, the National Advisory Council on aeronautics, there you go, okay. And he gave me all the early systems thinking texts from von Bertalanffy, Ackoff, Churchman, Checkland checklist, and all of the early texts as they were sort of emerging back then that was back in the 70s. And I went off blindly thinking that everybody was going to view the world as a system. And boy, was I surprised, surprised, you know, people didn't even know what I was talking about. And but I came to the world of viewing it as a system and using system dynamics and systems thinking, and through my career, a lot of mentors and board members and investors said, "Hey, you've got a really interesting way of viewing the world." And then a mutual friend of ours, Barbara Kellerman, wrote an article, and it was leadership is not a person, it's a system and I wrote her and I said, "Barbara, you're singing my song!" I've been saying this for a long time, and we went back and forth. And so I put together a team or a panel for the ILA to really look at people who were exploring the confluence of leadership and systems thinking, and what we found was there not a lot of people they know it, they've thought about it a little, they've read a little bit about it, but they haven't really deeply applied it in areas. And I'll tell you an interesting story. Based on my book, simple complexity, I was asked to give a talk to a major financial institution that you would all know, your, your listeners would all know. And so I had 84 of the senior leaders in the room and I asked them, I said, is your enterprise a system and all the hands went up? everybody agreed their enterprise was a system, I said, is your enterprise a subsystem of the greater system? That's your holding company if you will? And everybody said yes, I said, How about your division department, strategic business unit? Is it a subsystem of the system, which is a subsystem everybody agrees that How about you as a person or your project? Is that a system? Everybody agreed that everything was a system? And then I asked how many of you have studied deeply systems thinking systems, dynamic systems sciences - any of the systems disciplines? Three people? Yeah. And so we all know we're living in them, but most of us really don't know how they affect us and how the system takes on a life of its own. Barbara refers to what Barbara Kellerman refers to as his as the context that we lead in. And so that's where we really got started and where Tony Middlebrooks picked up and said, "Hey, we really need to dig into this notion of the system being a context that the leader has to get oriented to, and they get all of their leaders and followers oriented to."
Scott Allen 6:37
Well, that's great. And maybe you can give Willie I don't want to just to turn into because it's a complex topic. But I love the title of your book, I love it. What are a couple of fundamental principles that people have to understand, or what would be a couple of foundational concepts for listeners, as we kind of proceed in the dialogue?
Willy Donaldson 6:58
Yeah, so the interesting title of my book is Simple Complexity, and I try to tie that in is because you cannot deal with the complexity straight on. And so we create models and mental models and proxies for the system and the complexity. And those have to be simple for people to understand. But what we then forget, is that that simple model is tied to the complex model, and we and all the nuance that goes with it. So the first caution is just to be aware. In fact, in the book I talked about, beware, and behold...the system and all of its connections and all of its complexity. But also behold, if you can align all of the people to see the system the same way and talk about it in the same way, amazing things can occur. And I think it's one of the things that that leaders don't grasp. If you go back to W. Edwards Deming, you know, one of the great management thinkers and people, a lot of people think he was just a statistician, but he was a systems thinker. And his findings were that up to 94% of all the defects, faults, mistakes, misunderstandings, misalignments were systemic. And he points out that if you've hired the right people, they want to do the right thing. So why, why do systems keep failing? Well, it's got to be because the system is causing people to do the wrong things. And so what Herbert Simon talked about that I see and one of the concepts I would get across to most of the listeners is this notion of "bounded rationality" Scott, you can't deal with the whole. So we set up boundaries between finance and accounting, accounting and marketing, marketing and sales. And those are absolutely necessary. But the problem is they're artificial boundaries. They don't exist. There are no boundaries in the enterprise. There are no boundaries in your not-for-profit or your NGO. And yet people start to behave as if there are...they start to optimize sales, they start to optimize fundraising, they start to optimize these other areas, which is exactly what you'd expect them to do. Unless you taught them that that system throughput may actually demand that they sub-optimize their department. And that's just a cruelly counterintuitive way to look at the world.
Scott Allen 9:19
Well, what else?
Willy Donaldson 9:22
Well, there's a really interesting concept that I introduced in my book that I think not enough people get and that is if there are no boundaries, and if this thing is just one big system, how can I possibly get my head around, leading my particular area or my project and Arthur Koestler came up with a terrific concept of a whole lawn and a holon is something that is at the same time, a system but a part of a larger system. And the key thing about a whole lot is it never loses its systematicity and that's what I wanted my people I represented the people and their functions and policies as whole lawns because I wanted them to realize you can never give up the systematicity. Because if you do if people don't see the full system and the relationship, hermeneutics tells us that they will make it up for themselves, they will complete that hermeneutic cycle and complete the story in their mind. And so if you don't, if you don't let them know how they connect in the Don't let them know what's important to both the system and their functional reporting, they'll start to tend into this bounded rationality. Well,
Scott Allen 10:30
one of my favorite quotes Willie, and I've never asked this of an expert. So I'm excited to hear what you have to say. But one of my favorite quotes, it's been attributed to a number of different people. And you will have heard this many times. But "every system is perfectly designed for the results that it achieves." Do you agree with that? Do you agree with that?
Willy Donaldson 10:49
I absolutely agree with it. In fact, I start my book with it. And it has been attributed to a number of different people. I've used it for 30 years. But it is and if you look at the canonical model of a system inputs, through this black box, called the system to outputs, time, people in money into goods, services, whatever it is, if you look at that simple model, it can't be any other way. There's just this black box, and something's happening in there. And the results that you get out, are what they are, what most people don't want to recognize, what most leaders don't want to recognize is they are responsible for the results, they want to blame somebody else just like everybody else, but you cannot escape responsibility. The leader is the system architect, he or she sets up all those pieces, and is the only person who can mediate any challenges or things that are wrong with the system, the current system.
Scott Allen 11:50
Well, so you are a student of some of the seminal thinkers in this space. Right?
Willy Donaldson 11:57
That's correct.
Scott Allen 11:58
And what would you say? Most leaders need to know. Now I know you've given us some foundational concepts, but you just said something really, really important. They are the architect. And I imagine that the architect can do great damage. If they don't perceive themselves as the architect, if they don't have some foundational like you said, you're speaking with these very powerful leaders in a very well-established institution, and three of the 80, some had really actually explored this topic with any depth. What are the leaders need to know? What do they need to be thinking about? What do they have to have on their radar? And where do they go? Other than calling you?
Willy Donaldson 12:40
Well, that's the challenge. They need to understand that they are managing and running and leading a system. And the example that I gave you shows that so many people really don't understand they understand. And they'll say they're running a system, but they don't know what that means. And so, the first thing is to be humble and realize you don't know at all and that's really a challenge, you know, yeah. I don't see enough humility in leadership. And I think, secondly, you've got to realize how your biases get assembled through the silos that you come up with through the organization. You came up out of finance, you view the world as finance or operations. And so one of the programs that we all know about is these leadership training programs that get you through the different departments, really important to see those sorts of things and just having the humility to view the system differently and not look to blame other people. People don't realize and leaders don't realize how much the system drives behaviors. As Deming said, people want to do the right thing. And if they don't want to do the right thing, look at your hiring practices. During a public session, I had a CEO who stood up and told me I was an idiot, which a lot of people do. And he said that's just really, be you'll be at a rare company. But, you know, he said, this is all nonsense. You know, my people are deadbeats and you know, I can't trust them and blah, blah, blah. And before I could say anything, one of the other people in the seminar said, Well, wait a minute, why did you hire deadbeats and people you can't trust and he stumbled and stammered and said, "Well, well, you don't understand." And then somebody else stood up and said, "No, no, no, hold on. If you hired good people, and now they're deadbeats, and you can't trust them. I don't give you much for your management chops." So leaders can't escape the effects of the system. And they've got to dig in and really understand how the system performs and causes people to do things because we want to blame folks and we want to blame other people. And there's a paradox that I talked about, and it's really a cool paradox and that is one of the leader's jobs is to lock the system down and make it repeatable and predictable....that's what people want. But it's a fool's errand because everything in the system and around it is changing the economics, the external environments changing, people are aging processes are changing. And so building a company that's sort of poised on a Razor's Edge of change is hard to do when you have to get people comfortable in that environment. One of the ways I tried to do it is to train all of my people in systems thinking and to understand and view the world that way. Because systems thinking really is a worldview.
Scott Allen 15:31
A mindset almost right about your point, how you see what's happening around you. Well, tell us a little bit. I'd love to, I'd love to continue the conversation in two different ways. One, tell us a little bit about the Journal of Leadership Studies, that symposium, and some of the articles that are in there. And that excites you, and that you think, bring a really nice, interesting perspective to this conversation. And then I'd love to get your thoughts on...and this is not an exercise in politics...but as a case study, what does Biden has to have on his radar from systems thinking perspective, maybe we can go there a little bit towards the end. So we can all have that top of mind and be watching as to how he's intervening in, in a situation that's complex, incredibly complex. So let's talk first about the JLS Issue, and then while you're talking, you can multitask and formulate an answer for part two, which is not an easy question.
Willy Donaldson 16:42
So if you hear the smoke detectors go off, it's because my brain instantly caught that I'm not good at that.
Scott Allen 16:48
I'm overloading the system.
Willy Donaldson 16:49
Exactly. So I'm really excited about the symposium for the journal, say, Tony and Mark approached me and said, we really need to get seeing the panel, which was Barbara Kellerman, and Nathan harder and myself. And who am I, Donal Adkins? And we just talked about systems and how important it was they said, we've really got to get this message front and center with our readership. And so Tony proposed an issue. And as I looked at it, I thought there were enough material and enough reason to break it into two issues. And here's the reason why Michael Jackson, not a famous singer, but the famous systems thinker from England, pointed out that there are two different types of systems. One is bounded systems and one is unbounded systems. And so bounded systems are ones that have some form of governance that's readily apparent, right? It may not be good governance, but there is a group or somebody whose response may be a board of directors, it could be an association, etc. But there is notionally governance going on. And then unbounded systems are natural systems that we can't do anything about. And so we know a fair amount about the bounded systems, but we still don't really view them as systems. So the first issue is all about looking at bounded systems and talking about governance talking about this notion of the holon model, how it, how it causes you to use both/and thinking. Both my role his response is important and the system role, both leadership, and followership is important and talks about the paradoxes. Donna Ladkin talks beautifully about sensing the system, there's so much of what we do is what we want to count. And, and things that that we can see, in systems, a lot of the relationships and a lot of the behaviors have to be sensed. And that's not something that leaders tend to do, you know, we tend to push harder, particularly in times of complexity and urgency, we push harder, talk louder, expect more and often the right thing to do is to relax back and just reflect on the system and sense the system, and to step back from it and view it differently. So that's the first version. And then the second version is unbounded systems where there is no governance so you know, the environment, global warming, we can all we can hope to do as leaders create a response to those systems, we can never govern them. We don't even understand them in many cases. So all we can hope to do is build a coalition that can respond to it intelligently. Yeah, that's a very different challenge and one that most of our leadership models are not particularly well set up, to grapple with. And so we're going to talk about that in some way and show some examples of people who are really dealing with tremendous complexity and open systems and trying to, to bring coalition's together to solve them and manage them is all you can hope for. To do and manage our response.
Scott Allen 20:03
So I collect meteorites. And that would be perhaps one of the larger unbounded systems would just be the Galactic system that's at play, right? Yeah. So an example might be that we can, we have, there's no governance or no control that we have over something impacting the United States or the earth. But we can control potentially how we would think about responding. So I was watching literally a video, you mentioned NASA, earlier, of us, a scientist at JPL at NASA. And this gentleman was going through all of the different ideas they'd had about how we address a, I forget what they're called now, but it's a near-Earth object if there was an impact what we would do to intervene, but they haven't come up with anything that they think would actually work. It's not like the Bruce Willis film where we just, you know, get in a rocket ship and head up there. What are some examples that you explore? So that would be a galactic version of an unbounded system? Am I correct?
Willy Donaldson 21:06
Absolutely. And so the most visible system that most of your listeners will know about is, of course, climate change and global warming, right? We know. And, and we have some mechanisms that are beginning to get control of it, like the Paris Accords and others, but there are breaks the, the conventions on whaling, but they fail when one group or a group of nations don't participate, and we don't like it and quite honestly, that's where systems thinking is gets challenged, is people don't want to come together, they don't want to compromise in the system, you have to compromise. Well, right, the system will always dominate, and somebody who's going to have to get and there'll be winners and losers. And our leadership and followership tools don't really address that well, particularly across geopolitical boundaries, which again, don't exist, right? Global warming could care less about the distinction of Chinese and American, it just there's no effect. We have to figure out a way as humans, to connect on that level if we're going to deal with some of these problems and challenges. And, one of the questions that we're going to propose in the symposium is, Is there even a model of leadership? Can leaders that have the humility, to compromise even get elected and stay in power long enough to affect change? Wow. And I think what I see is an inversion has to occur, where followership becomes the most important function and followers have to rise up and demand leadership of an ilk that is humble and does use systems thinking. And that's going to be hard to hard to come by I think there's there's a wonderful textbook that Churchman wrote called The System's Approach and its Enemies, their own enemies to this way of thinking, and the top two are politics. politicians who are in power do not want people to be thinking broadly and systemically, because if they do, they'll see the system and they'll see how they use the system to stay in power. Yeah, and the other is academics. Academics are so so siloed into these swim lanes, chemistry, physics, math, accounting, finance, that we don't cross disciplines, we don't share our disciplinary knowledge, we use different language to talk about the same phenomenon. Yeah, we see it all the time. And Peter Senge, who wrote the Fifth Discipline, famous systems thinker, said, you know, the system's thinking is the discipline that integrates the disciplines, you have to think beyond it. Because if there truly are no boundaries, you better get good at listening to other people and other points of view and, and perspectives.
Scott Allen 23:49
Yeah, yeah. Willie, talk about COVID-19 and systems thinking...
Willy Donaldson 23:56
absolutely. I just did this the other night for my high school asked me to give a talk on it. And, you know, let's, look at I use Dana Meadows' really sparse, elegant definition of a system, "a set of elements that interrelate for a particular purpose or characteristics that have behaviors." So if you look at COVID-19, it's a bunch of RNA and proteins that interconnect and interrelate and work together. And you might say, well, gee, we don't really know what the purpose of a virus is or what its goal is. But we do know one thing characteristic set of behaviors is it's going to find new hosts so that it can replicate and survive and mutate. Yeah, that's all you need to know about that system. And none of the boundaries that feel so comfortable to us, or have any use in combating that system. Right? Geopolitical boundaries. Don't help black, white, male, female, rich, poor, none of them. And so it is a system that we have to combat and we have to understand the systems that we use to try to combat it, if you look at the SIR model, a (susceptible, infected, recovered) model that all of the medical practitioners use, it's a system thinking model, looking at stocks, the stock of susceptible people with flows into the infected group with flows to the recovered group, and you can base you can take that whole system and model it and predict what's going to happen based on infection rates and social interactions and distancing. So and then you get into an interesting concept in systems thinking, and that is this notion of "trade-offs," which make you trade things off, and so we are trading off time in the disease. Right? We're going to be with this disease a lot longer than if we just let herd immunity take over and everybody got sick. Well, why are we trading off that? Because if we don't do that, our hospital system is going to collapse? And you're going to get runaway deaths and more people are going to be harmed. And then we start to connect with the economic system, okay, we're also trading off just destroying some businesses. And so those are the really hard complex trade-offs that systems and systems colliding and interacting make us trade-off. And leaders need to understand that and followers need to understand and not blame somebody but understand the greater system at work.
Scott Allen 26:28
Well, it was interesting, the podcast that we'll release, just before this one, I was speaking with Brad Jackson, Brad Jackson is in New Zealand. He used to be on the board of the International Leadership Association. He's a professor, and he's also a dean. But it was really interesting to hear him talk about how that country responded, you have Jacinda Arden, and, you know, he said, it was really interesting. He said it was really, almost in some ways invigorating to watch 5 million people with a common vision, work to achieve an objective. It was very, very interesting too and so I tried to unpack a little bit...well, what was it in he didn't necessarily think that it was all her, but and his topic of the love of his is "leading in place," how does the place serve as a character in the context and the dynamic, right? But it was a really, really interesting conversation because of fundamentally a different approach to and a different system in place than a lot of places in the world. And he said, you know, look, we're an island, it's a little bit easier in some ways. But we all had to grow in the same direction to get this under control. Right. So that was fascinating to have that conversation with him.
Willy Donaldson 27:54
It is and one of the emerging, you know, systems have this property called an emergent property where things emerge from the system, it's not just a collection of parts, but they actually start to, to evolve and take on a character of their own. And culture is an emergent property of a system. Yeah, it doesn't exist by itself, there's not a dial, you can go You can't buy more of it, it comes out of the the bringing together of all the elements of the system. And, you know, this is where the US system is much harder to deal with, in these sorts of pandemic problems and big global challenges. You know, we have this, "independent, don't tell me what I can do streak." That's really hard to deal with when you have to try to impose some sort of will or whatever. And secondly, we have 50 states, all with different ways of viewing the problem. And so it's much harder for us to respond to a systemic challenge like COVID than it is a small nation like New Zealand and one that's much more homogenous.
Scott Allen 28:57
Yeah. Well, let's, shift gears, unless there's something else you want to I have seen the steam coming out of your head. I know you've been thinking about this. Right. But from a systems thinking perspective, what does President-Elect Biden have to have on his radar to be successful? What would Willie Donaldson, the systems thinker, suggest? What do you think?
Willy Donaldson 29:21
You know, I think, and I'd like to think he's beginning to do that. And then that's to understand that there is much more that connects us and that I use a term we spend a lot of our time in violent agreement. You know, we agree on some things, but we fight about it. And so toning down the rhetoric one of the things about systems is if you think about elements that interact with a purpose, it's possible for those elements to be at cross purposes and bringing down the cross purposes and restoring a sense of common purpose is really important. And so Think, you know, again thinking systemically. Another is it feels comfortable to try to beggar the other side, we won. You know, we're just going to force our agenda, one because this wasn't a runaway, and he's not going to have full control over everything. That's going to be hard to do. But that's the beauty of a democracy is it should be hard to get change through you got to get people to agree, and to compromise. And that's one of the huge challenges that I think this country face is we've gotten so polarized, nobody's willing to compromise and to come out and say they're willing to compromise and you can get, you know, sidetracked, but that's precisely what the system, particularly a complex adaptive system, like the United States requires on a daily basis. And so if politicians cannot compromise, that's going to be hard. So I think Mr. Biden, you know, has to try, to seek a compromise as broadly as he can. And then finally, we have to realize that winners and losers are going to be in the system and the losers are going to fight you if you don't take care of them. There's this feeling of all you lost. And that's just tough. No, you've actually got to bring them along. So going back to our discussion of global warming, there's a reason the coal industry has fought so hard to stay around, because there's a lot of people's lives and, and livelihoods that depend on it. So you can't just say, well, we're just not going to do that anymore. You have to figure out ways for them to elegantly exit the system and benefit in some other way. Yeah. And yeah,
Scott Allen 31:33
The competing commitments. Have you ever read immunity to change by Robert Keegan? Have you ever read that? Yep. Such a great, such a great way of thinking, right? Because you can start to see the system at play, even the individual level. So the system at play may be stalling you from achieving some objective or goal that you want to on a personal level, and you can start to see that system at play. But when that goes to a team, or when that goes to an organizational level or a societal level, it's just, it's it's mind-boggling. It really is. Well, it's so much respect, Willie, for how your mind thinks!
Willy Donaldson 32:11
Yeah, that's why I talk about, you know, organizations have a highly developed antibody, immune system response, they will try to throw those changes out and those people who are threatening them and it's interesting, I want leaders to realize that that's actually a tribute to the organization, people are trying to defend it. And that's where you've got to change their mind and say, "No, no, we have to change." You know, Todd Jick at Harvard talks about you have to get the organization just as worried as you are about the status quo. So that they'll see the reason and the impetus to go forward. Because if they're comfortable, and you've already trained them that this is the way you should do things. Now you got to untrain them and tell them, Hey, this is a new way. And here's why.
Scott Allen 32:56
Yeah, yeah. Well, Willie, what are you in? What kind of wind down for the day? But what are you reading or listening to or streaming that has really intrigued you in recent times? What comes to mind?
Willy Donaldson 33:11
A couple of things I've been going back and spending a lot of time on the neurobiology and the way people form their mental models, because, you know, people view the world. And, and, and as Charles Sanders Peirce, said, you know, we get this fixation of beliefs, and we just, we're so stubborn in changing our opinions and our biases, etc. So I've been really doing a lot of work on how people think and form those beliefs and how you can change and I think that's important for leaders and followers to understand Yes, I tried to work that into my, my corporate universities, I don't know if you're familiar with Shane Parrish, Farnam Street Blog and Shane is a Canadian who is doing some really interesting work and bringing sister together I just reread Team of Teams if you've if you're familiar with I think, I'm not. Ed Hess is a friend of mine at the University of Virginia at the Darden School, just finished a new book called Hyper Learning, and his book prior to that was great, and I really commend it to your readers and it was Humility is the New Smart. Okay, you know, when the internet exists, and on your phone, you can get virtually any information you want. And machines are starting to take over a lot of our life, we'd better get good at the uniquely human things. And one of those is is humility and empathy. And Hyper Learning is all about learning and relearning and retraining your mind to deal with reality as it unfolds. And so I've been really spending a lot of time on how people change and evolve because I think that's what a leader's job is, is to constantly evolve the organization. You have to be able to do that and you have to train your followers to be able to do that because again, the world outside just changing. The world inside is changing. People are aging, they're seeing new things or you're having to adopt new products, new constituencies, etc. So, to me, it's all about change, etc. And then Oh, go ahead I'm sorry to say that the symposium has been just terrific, you know, connecting with people like Barbara and Donna and Nathan harder and just, you know, really great leadership scholars who are thinking about these problems. And I've tried to reach out for the second one to some really interesting practitioners who are doing some cool stuff around the world and trying to bring systems thinking and systems leadership ahead.
Scott Allen 35:37
Awesome. Awesome. What are a couple of seminal systems thinking resources that we could point to, other than your book, which I will put in the show notes, but what are some other seminal pieces of work that we can point people? That would be a nice entry point into the topic?
Willy Donaldson 35:55
Absolutely. Well, the one I love is by Dana but Donella Meadows, thinking and systems and it's a primer, it's really terrific. There are other fantastic systems thinking books, like Senge's Fith Discipline, but it tends to be kind of unapproachable and hard to gather data, meadows, books, thinking, and systems are really approachable. And just a great primer, Derek Cabrera at Cornell has written a great book called Making Systems Thinking Easy or Simple. And he's got a great framework for thinking about and thinking in systems. So those are two that I highly recommend. There are some great sources on the internet for systems thinking. There are, you know, there are dozens of other sources out there, but some of them are a lot more antiquated. Now, and, but those are two that I highly recommend. Now, just a note, and full disclosure, my book is all about systems thinking applied to an enterprise a not-for-profit, or for-profit, a university team. And so it doesn't get into this notion of unbounded systems thinking but much more focused. And that's why I think it's appropriate to Leadership Studies.
Scott Allen 37:15
Willie, last question. You have mentioned that you would lead nine organizations is that accurate?
Willy Donaldson 37:22
Eight, officially, and then I was acting CEO of three others, so...
Scott Allen 37:27
Did you find that your methodology, your way of thinking your way of that mindset served you and each of those instances,
Willy Donaldson 37:36
I really did, and in fact, that's what really led me to write the book, I had board members investors, and some of my co-workers who said, you know, the way you put these pieces together really make sense. And I haven't heard about it before you should write a book. And so I really do think taking a systems perspective helped me I think, realizing that the system is bigger than I am more powerful and gave me the humility to do that. And also understanding that each system has a context. And that is the time and place that it exists in. This means you can't just take the playbook from the last system and apply it you see that all the time. And I see it with owners and founders. I've read just read Steve Jobs's book, and I'm now gonna go run my company like apple. Okay, but you're not Steve Jobs, and it's not a bowl. So that's not gonna work.
Scott Allen 38:28
And you may get fired as the founder. And they may not ask you to come back. Well, sir, thank you so much. We really, really appreciate it. Well, thank you for the work that you do. I will put all of that content in the show notes. And we'll let people know how they can get in touch with you and learn more about your work. But we're excited about that issue of the Journal of Leadership Studies. It's a symposium, and it's on systems thinking and leadership.
Willy Donaldson 38:59
Scott, I can't thank you enough. It's been a pleasure.
Scott Allen 39:01
Okay, be well take care. Yep.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai