Applications of System Dynamics - Jay W. Forrester

let me welcome everybody here to the second of this year's Killian award uh lectures uh recognizing the professional achievements Professor Jay Forester of the SL School of Management I'm glad to see many familiar faces here most of you many of you I know were at the uh first lecture last week but um I think even more people are here today so the word must be spreading it this man has some interesting things to say um it occurred to me that some of you might want to do a little reading to follow up some of the U uh points made in these lectures and U uh last week particularly Professor Forester mentioned something about the background of computer technology at MIT and his role in the Whirlwind project and othe r events in the 1940s and 50s and I've since come across the first book that I listed here by Will dies and lingren uh which is an excellent history of electrical engineering computer science at MIT a very handsome book uh well undertaken was to try to explain the very major differences between the growth scenarios that one could see in companies in the high-tech field there were those that were launched grew a while and failed for one reason or another very large number that grow briefly and then move into a state of stagnation those that have a continuing growth Trend with repeated major crises and a few very rare cases of sustained high growth with uh nothing in the way of severe crisis the question is how and why and the objective of a corporate model is not to study especially the one particular company or situation but rather to to uh study the family to which that one belongs to obtain a generic model that tells you why the differences between the performances of the different examples in the uh field