“The system of transportation is not coherent; it is not treated as integral. Roads compete with with railroads and airlines in chaotic fashion, and at immense cost to the nation.”

—  Anthony Stafford Beer

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 7, Automation and Such, p. 186.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The system of transportation is not coherent; it is not treated as integral. Roads compete with with railroads and airl…" by Anthony Stafford Beer?
Anthony Stafford Beer photo
Anthony Stafford Beer23
British theorist, consultant, and professor 1926–2002

Related quotes

Buckminster Fuller photo

“Gravity is the inwardly cohering force acting integratively on all systems. Radiation is the outwardly disintegrating force acting divisively upon all systems.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

000.113 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s00/p0000.html <br class="br">1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), &quot;Synergy&quot; onwards

“We (Ministry of Transportation and Communication) hope that the airline (China Airlines) will quickly and thoroughly investigate the incident (cigarette smuggling scandal), and disclose the results to the public.”

Wang Kwo-tsai politician

Wang Kwo-tsai (2019) cited in &quot; NSB officials used Presidential Office trucks: lawmaker http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2019/07/25/2003719283&quot; on Taipei Times, 25 July 2019

“It makes sense to describe a core competence as a complex adaptive system, located in the lower regions of the I-Space between an ordered regime in which knowledge assets get frozen into technologies and a chaotic regime in which the stability necessary for effective organizational coordination and integration remains absent. Core competences, then, have their being in a region of the I-Space sandwiched between an excess of usable structure and a total lack of it. We hypothesize that the possession of a core competence is one measure of a firm’s ability to deal with complexity.”

Max Boisot (1943–2011) British academic and educator

Source: Knowledge Assets, 1998, p. 205

Ervin László photo

“A system in one perspective is a subsystem in another. But the systems view always treats systems as integrated wholes of their subsidiary components and never as the mechanistic aggregate of parts in isolable causal relations.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 14.

“System costs can be considered in many different ways. For example, the cost for making the system and the cost for operating it may be used as a basic for judging the total cost. The total cost may also be arrived at in another fashion, as, for example, the sum of the fixed cost, variable cost, past investment and other charges. Furthermore, in many cases where systems engineering is required several time phases are involved for which the cost factors may be significant, such as the study phase, the breadboard phase, the prototype phase, and the production phase.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 13

“A system is said to be coherent if every fact in the system is related every other fact in the system by relations that are not merely conjunctive. A deductive system affords a good example of a coherent system.”

Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) British philosopher

As quoted in A Modern Introduction to Logic (1930), p. 198.

Francis Escudero photo

“We already spoke of lowering costs of food, labor, and transportation.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Jack McDevitt photo

“Sometimes the cost of integrity is the loss of a friend.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 7 (p. 69)

Bill Bryson photo

“It would be a great abuse of my position to write that it was Northwest Airlines that treated us in this shoddy and inexcusable way, so I won't.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

I'm a Stranger Here Myself (US), Notes From a Big Country (UK) (1998)

Ilya Prigogine photo

“Coherent behavior is the characteristic feature of biological systems.”

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) physical chemist

Marjorie Grene, ‎Ilya Prigogine (1971) Interpretations of life and mind: essays around the problem of reduction. p. 2.

Related topics