Book Description

This book provides the first clear, comprehensive, and accessible account of complex adaptive social systems, by two of the field's leading authorities. Such systems--whether political parties, stock markets, or ant colonies--present some of the most intriguing theoretical and practical challenges confronting the social sciences. Engagingly written, and balancing technical detail with intuitive explanations, Complex Adaptive Systems focuses on the key tools and ideas that have emerged in the field since the mid-1990s, as well as the techniques needed to investigate such systems. It provides a detailed introduction to concepts such as emergence, self-organized criticality, automata, networks, diversity, adaptation, and feedback. It also demonstrates how complex adaptive systems can be explored using methods ranging from mathematics to computational models of adaptive agents.

John Miller and Scott Page show how to combine ideas from economics, political science, biology, physics, and computer science to illuminate topics in organization, adaptation, decentralization, and robustness. They also demonstrate how the usual extremes used in modeling can be fruitfully transcended.

Customer Reviews (3)

A Gentle and Insightful Introduction to Complexity
Living systems are generally complex, dynamic adaptive systems with emergent properties that analytical models attending only to the local interactions of the system fail to capture. We must complement the standard analytical methods of physics, biology, and economics by additional mathematical tools, such as agent-based simulation and network theory.

A complex system consists of a large population of similar entities (e.g., human individuals) who interact through regularized channels (e.g., networks, markets, social institutions) with significant stochastic elements, without a system of centralized organization and control (i.e., if there is a state, it controls only a fraction of all social interactions, and itself is a complex system). A complex system is adaptive if it evolves through some evolutionary (genetic, cultural, agent-based silicon, or other) process of hereditary reproduction, mutation, and selection.. Characterizing a system as complex adaptive does not explain its operation, and does not solve any problems. However, it suggests that certain modeling tools are likely to be effective that have little use in a non-complex system.

Such novel research tools are needed because a complex adaptive system generally has emergent properties that cannot be analytically derived from its component parts. The stunning success of modern physics and chemistry lies in their ability to avoid or strictly limit emergence. Indeed, the experimental method in natural science is to create highly simplified laboratory conditions, under which modeling becomes analytically tractable. Physics is no more effective than economics or biology in analyzing complex real-world phenomena in situ.. The various branches of engineering (electrical, chemical, mechanical) are effective because they recreate in everyday life artificially controlled, non-complex, non-adaptive, environments that can directly apply the discoveries of physics and chemistry. This option is generally not open to most behavioral scientists, who rarely have the opportunity of ``engineering'' social institutions and cultures.

Miller and Page stress that complex systems cannot be properly modeled using the statistical and mathematical tools associated with differentiable manifolds and normal statistical distributions. Rather, complex phenomena exhibit power law behavior in which statistical distributions have "fat tails" that lead to considerable activity far from the distributions central tendency. A rather stunning example, discussed in Chapter 9, is the size distribution of wars in the world occurring between 1820 and 1943. When the number of deaths in a war (a good measure of the size of the war) is 10 to the power n, the number of wars with this size is about 2 x 3 to the power 7-n.

Miller and Page do a find job of making complexity analysis accessible to the non-expert, without overwhelming the reader with specialized aspects of agent-based modeling or dynamical systems. They provide an exciting stepping-off point for detailed studies in particular disciplines.

Annie Wu -- Book #1
I am a purchasing agent who buys books for my faculty, and as far as I know, this faculty member is very impressed with this particular book.

The Emergence of Convergence
At the time of writing this review, this book isn't searchable through Amazon, that's too bad because if you're reading the reviews wondering if it's worth buying, just browsing through any page from the intro or appendix B would clearly resolve any remnant hesitation. This book is a must have for anyone even remotely interested in complex adaptive systems. Scott Page and John Miller dress the landscape and state of the art of computational social science, the issues are motivated from the ground up and the existing approaches to resolve them explicitly detailed, yet using clear and jargon free language. For example, descriptions of the many concepts repeatedly used in the scientific method (of CAS et al) such as ergodicity or optimization theory are refreshing and insightful, simply stuff you don't get from textbooks, but rather that one would learn over years of experience doing.

In summary, the authors are handing us an expert summary of literature and developments of a complex field in a concise, fun and delightful read, it would be a shame to miss it. ... Read more

Book Description

We are living in an ever more complex world, an epoch where human actions can accordingly acquire far-reaching potentialities. Complex and adaptive dynamical systems are ubiquitous in the world surrounding us and require us to adapt to new realities and the way of dealing with them.

Book Description
Complex behavior can occur in any system made up of large numbers of interacting constituents, be they atoms in a solid, cells in a living organism, or consumers in a national economy. Analysis of this behavior often involves making important assumptions and approximations, the exact nature of which vary from subject to subject. Foundations of Complex-system Theoriesbegins with a description of the general features of complexity and then examines a range of important concepts, such as theories of composite systems, collective phenomena, emergent properties, and stochastic processes. Each topic is discussed with reference to the fields of statistical physics, evolutionary biology, and economics, thereby highlighting recurrent themes in the study of complex systems. This detailed yet nontechnical book will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about complex systems and their behavior. It will also be of great interest to specialists studying complexity in the physical, biological, and social sciences. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

4.5 Stars-The whole is not the sum of the parts;Excellent and scholarly
This is a very interesting book.The author demonstrates that she has command over a number of different fields.She exhibits awide ranging scholarship in this book.In a nutshell,one can categorize the major conclusions she arrives at as the whole is not the sum of the parts alone.Neither a strictly micro or macro approach to the different fields she investigates,using a complex systems framework, yields the idealized types of scientific discoveryand knowledge one finds postulatedin some philosophy of science discourses that emphasize deductive closure laws.I have one slight criticism of the book,which is why I have subtracted one half a star.The author has a deep general understanding of the Keynes-Knight distinction between risk and uncertainty in economics(and in social sciences).However,she lacks an understanding of the specifics of Keynes's approach in the A Treatise on Probability(1921;TP).She is unaware of Keynes's interval estimate approach to probability,his index,w,used to measure the completeness of the evidence ,ranging from ignorance through partial knowledge to a complete information set,and Keynes's conventional coefficient of weight and risk,which treats risk, based on the purely deductive laws of probability, as a special case.This would be a very minor criticism if she had integrated the work of D.Ellsberg(Ellsberg's 2001 book,Risk,Ambiguity,and Decision gives a modern,improved and updated version of the TP) and B.Mandelbrot into her discussions involving economics,risk,and uncertainty(Ellsberg's Ambiguity with his rho and alpha indexes and the wild versus mild risk of the cauchy distribution versus normal distribution as discussed by Mandelbrot).Unfortunately,Ellsberg's contributions are not discussed at all while Mandelbrot receives a single footnote that completely ignores his contributions to economics.She can certainly obtain a 5-star rating by bringing out a revised edition in which the original,technical, pioneering work of Keynes is covered followed by the modern and updated contributions of Ellsberg and Mandelbrot.

a fascinating book -- recommended to philosophers
Philosophers of science need to read this book:the hands-on
account of how three sciences work is a healthy
corrective to the usual practice of writing philosophy of science
without actually knowing how the science is done.

A Professional work
This is an amazing work. Sunny Auyang has written an easily comprehenedible book on applications of complexity theories to economics, biology and physics.It is a professional writing to professionals indifferent fields.One needs college level maths and some physics to fullygrasp it but she has made minimum use of mathematical symbols. Her writingflows, the examples are clear, some illuminate important issues in theapplied fields, some are just homey bits that convey an idea insightfully.A lot of depth in her philosophical explorations of the complexity ideas. I consider this to be a must for any person studying or instructing insystem thinking. ... Read more

Book Description
This book explores the process of modeling complex systems in the widest sense of that term, drawing on examples from such diverse fields as ecology, epidemiology, sociology, seismology, as well as economics. It also provides the mathematical tools for studying the dynamics of these systems. Boccara takes a carefully inductive approach in defining what it means for a system to be "complex" (and at the same time addresses the equally elusive concept of emergent properties). This is the first text on the subject to draw comprehensive conclusions from such a wide range of analogous phenomena. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A very good intructory book
This book encloses a large variety of models in an introductory level and opens the possibility to the students to go deep in specific topics through its references. So, it is adequate for a regular course on complex systems. The mean-field part of book provides a concise, clear and complete presentation of dynamical systems. In my opinion, the agent-based chapters iswell presented, but do not cover satisfactorily the criticality of epidemic spreading, a central point in complex system modeling.

A good comprehensive presentation of the state of the art
This is a fine book to learn the state of the art in 2004 in the field of complex systems modeling. It has the right blend of useful illustrations from many types of applications and of clean mathematics, without overdoing it in terms of abstraction. It is expensive but I don't regret my purchase. ... Read more

Book Description
Modularity -- the attempt to understand systems as integrations of partially independent and interacting units -- is today a dominant theme in the life sciences, cognitive science, and computer science. The concept goes back at least implicitly to the Scientific (or Copernican) Revolution, and can be found behind later theories of phrenology, physiology, and genetics; moreover, art, engineering, and mathematics rely on modular design principles. This collection broadens the scientific discussion of modularity by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, including artificial life, cognitive science, economics, evolutionary computation, developmental and evolutionary biology, linguistics, mathematics, morphology, paleontology, physics, theoretical chemistry, philosophy, and the arts.

The contributors debate and compare the uses of modularity, discussing the different disciplinary contexts of "modular thinking" in general (including hierarchical organization, near-decomposability, quasi-independence, and recursion) or of more specialized concepts (including character complex, gene family, encapsulation, and mosaic evolution); what modules are, why and how they develop and evolve, and the implication for the research agenda in the disciplines involved; and how to bring about useful cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer on the topic. The book includes a foreword by the late Herbert A. Simon addressing the role of near-decomposability in understanding complex systems. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Too Modular
This is a very interesting book. Or at least, it's a book about a cluster of very interesting topics, and occasionally contains interesting insights about these topics.

The problem is that the book is a bit too modular - the chapters don't work very well together. Every author seems to have his own concept of modularity. As several of the chapters are primarily concerned with defining modularity, this could be taken to be a good thing, but it isn't. The simple reason is that many of the concepts of modularity are simply not interesting to many readers. For me, Calabretta's chapter was very interesting, as well as Simon's introduction and some other chapters, but the chapters on modularity in art and in animal skeletons were just plain uninteresting. (Which is not to say that they are bad chapters in themselves, they are probably higly relevant to some people.)

Given that the book is likely to contain just a few chapters that interest you, I think the price is a bit too high for it to be worth buying. ... Read more

Book Description
This book, written by leading experts in the field, is intended for thoughtful leaders, advisors, and academics who want to better understand cutting edge thinking and the latest research on leadership in the complex, highly interconnected organization of today.Unlike most books on the subject, it does not purport to provide simple answers to difficult questions. Rather, it seeks to provide new insights and tools that have only recently become apparent through advances in complexity science-like, for example, the intricate dynamics of emergent leadership as simulated through agent-based modeling (ABM). Complex Systems Leadership Theory is a powerful beginning to what promises to be a deeper, more thoughtful investigation of how and why organizations succeed and what leaders can do to make a difference. ... Read more

Book Description
The study of complex systems in a unified framework has become recognized in recent years as a new scientific discipline, the ultimate in the interdisciplinary fields. Breaking down the barriers between physics, chemistry, and biology and the so-called soft sciences of psychology, sociology, economics and anthropology, this text explores the universal physical and mathematical principles that govern the emergence of complex systems from simple components. Dynamics of Complex Systems is the first text describing the modern unified study of complex systems. It is designed for upper-undergraduate/beginning graduate level students, and covers a broad range of applications in a broad array of disciplines. A central goal of this text is to develop models and modeling techniques that are useful when applied to all complex systems. This is done by adopting both analytic tools, including statistical mechanics and stochastic dynamics, and computer simulation techniques, such as cellular automata and Monte Carlo. In four sets of paired, self-contained chapters, Yaneer Bar-Yam discusses complex systems in the context of neural networks, protein folding, living organisms, and finally, human civilization itself. He explores fundamental questions about the structure, dynamics, evolution, development and quantitative complexity that apply to all complex systems. In the first chapter, mathematical foundations such as iterative maps and chaos, probability theory and random walks, thermodynamics, information and computation theory, fractals and scaling, are reviewed to enable the text to be read by students and researchers with a variety of backgrounds. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

beautifully written and highly useful
This is a beautifully written and thought-provoking work that presents the field of complex systems in a unified manner. The writing is highly engaging and stimulating with a broad range of topics. The material is pitched at just the right level, focusing on the concepts without getting buried in unnecessary details, while avoiding superficiality. I highly recommend this excellent book.

The worst side of normal science
The book is a tour around the paradigms used by scientists in
Complex Systems. While normal science is about using and re-using the paradigms without much creativity or true aportation to knowledge or understanding, the situation is worse in complex systems, since, as an emerging area it has multiple (competing?) paradigms, to the point that it is not possible to define a "complex system" in a form that encompases all the paradigms. The book certainly does not solve this problem, yet the author acknowledges the difficulty present in saying what a complex system is.
Complex systems is not an area of research but a community of researchers united by their interests.
The book is then a compilation of the "how to" and the believes for each paradigm, several of them carry very little science and have left the idea of "refutation" burried under piles of meaningless papers. Not surprissingly, some authors claim that complex systems is a postmodern scienceComplexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems. And truly, the complex systems of Bar-Yam are only possible after we have buried reason and have accepted that science has nothing to do with truth.
Too much for me, not a book I recommend to my students.

Perpetuates the usual myths
that information is the opposite of entropy which is a measure of disorder or uncertainty. However because this book is about complexity and not information per se, I will only briefly refer to his mistakes with the latter as I have explained them further in other reviews that are specifically on that topic.

Shannon's information rate from communications theory, R, is an entropy like formula but most critically it is a state function difference of the uncertainty reduction to a recognizer after a measurement. Entropy is not a proper measure of disorder or uncertainty; the 2nd law of entropy increase of the universe applied long before there were any observers. It is a measure of the dispersal of energy. Going back in time is not going back to perfect order, but quite the opposite. I have not seen proper definitions in any book but there are PhD level articles available on the internet with proper definitions such as the Principia Cybernetica Web and molecular biologist Dr Thomas Schneider's website. Biologist Richard Dawkins also has an accurate short article on the internet. Most physicists have the definitions wrong unfortunately and believe information evolved before life, which is false. (A recognizer is required, whether a ribosome or mind etc.) Instead a better definition of complexity than the present author offers would indicate that the universe has increased in complexity through gravitational clumping (among other things). By making the mistake then the physicists and present author believe maximum information is randomness or equilibrium. This is the definition of algorithmic complexity.

As the author adapts algorithmic theory to his complexity profile he arrives at formulas that are observer dependant: "the complexity profile [is] the length of the description [of] the error allowed [as] the description increases." This is of little or no practical use. Again the universe has grown in complexity (or at least in pockets or we wouldn't be here) without relying on the degree of focus of any observer. A crystal is highly ordered relative to say a human cell whose complexity is a result of a multitude of interactions of chemical agents and macro molecules. This is where his analysis falls silent, in fact wrong. He says (page 741) "short-range correlations decrease the microstate complexity..." Well that's because he has a flawed method of using statistical mechanics. There is likely no universal complexity algorithm. Consider that a single gene can yield up to thousands of different proteins. One should be wary however of any formula that treats correlations as reduced complexity! Again the crystal vs the cell!

However there are ways of measuring the critical biological requirement of interactions that in fact increase complexity, the opposite of equilibrium statistical mechanics, a flawed tool. For instance in a recent article at lanl.arXiv.org, authors Edwin Wang et. al. apply Pearson's correlation coefficient to show that "genes with higher cis-regulation complexity are more coordinately regulated by transcription factors at the transcriptional level and by micro RNA's at the post-transcriptional level. This is a potentially novel discovery of a mechanism for coordinated regulation of gene expression...We found a positive correlation between these twogroups of transcriptional regulators... " Measures of correlations are key in studying biological complexity and are not based on an observer's focus ability.

For a layman's guide to the issue of correlations for life see Irun Cohen's book 'Tending Adam's Garden' (though it has no quantitative aspect).

Interesting but incomplete
That physical systems are complex has been acknowledged for centuries, but only in recent decades has the scientific community, especially physicists and biologists, directly confronted complexity. This book discusses complex systems from the dynamical systems perspective, and as such can be read by physicists, mathematicians, and mathematical biologists. Biologists in particular will find the discussion of `emergence' the most important one, especially systems biologists. Physicists and mathematicians who study dynamical systems tend to not be concerned with their origins, whether they are in biology or some other area. But physicists do concern themselves with the experimental relevance of dynamical systems, unlike mathematicians who are sorely concerned with their formal properties, and do not care at all if they can find expression in the real world. But it goes without saying that the theory of complex systems has found application in finance, genetic engineering, cryptography, network engineering, and many other areas. This book gives a good overview of the techniques used to study complex systems, and can be read by anyone with the necessary mathematical preparation, consisting of probability theory and elementary calculus.

Systems that are simple can become complex by only a slight alteration in their configuration. The gravitational three-body system in classical mechanics is a good example of this. The dynamics of two objects interacting gravitationally can be solved explicitly, but the system consisting of three bodies cannot. The complexity in these two cases is measured by the availability of solutions to the dynamics of the system. The author is very aware that more involved measures of complexity are needed and he gives examples of these in the book. Mathematical techniques from probability and statistics are of course used throughout the book to frame these measures more quantitatively. This reflects the author's stated strategy throughout the book, namely to describe the essential characteristics of a class of systems, and employ statistical techniques to find the properties and behaviors of these systems.

The concepts of emergence and complexity are fundamental to a study of complex systems, the author argues and early on in the book he clears up some of the confusions behind the use of these terms in the scientific literature. A `complex system' is one which is constructed from many components and whose behavior cannot be determined from the behavior of these components, i.e. the behavior of the system is `emergent.' The `complexity' of a system, on the other hand, is the amount of information needed to describe the system. This is a somewhat subtle definition, and quite a few proposals have been put forward in the literature for measuring complexity. The author settles on a familiar method, the `entropy' for measuring complexity, but with a warning to the reader that the calculation of the entropy is dependent on the particular length or time scale over which the system is observed. For extremely long time scales (of observation), one can get away with describing systems as always in equilibrium. In this case the entropy would be maximum but the system would not be viewed as being complex. For very short time scales (of observation) , the entropy of the system is very small but due to the ability to observe the microscopic dynamics of the system it would be viewed as highly complex.

These considerations lead the author to introduce the concept of a 'complexity profile' of a system, which he discusses at some length in the last pages of the book. The complexity profile is designed to study the the dependence of complexity on both length and time scales. The concept is dependent on the notion of a sequence of observers that are ordered according to their ability to distinguish microstates. The author calculates the complexity profile of the ideal gas and shows that the complexity of a microstate for this case is simply the entropy, but as the number of microstates with a given region increases, the complexity approaches zero. Other examples of the complexity profile are discussed, one being for observers that only measure the positions of particles and not the momentum. The author also studies the connection between the complexity profile and the predictability or chaotic behavior of the system, where chaotic systems are viewed as being ones where information from a particular scale can be transferred to a larger scale, as contrasted with dissipative systems where information on a large scale is transferred to a smaller scale. The author gives various arguments and calculations that illustrate the difference in complexity profiles between chaotic systems and those of conservative, nonchaotic systems. The discussion is fairly convincing but if the complexity profile is important in complex systems, its defintion and properties should have been included at the beginning of the book, and serve as a central theme behind the discussions throughout the entire book. As it stands the complexity profile comes across as a concept that is purely ancillary to the study of complex systems. It certainly does not appear to be indispensable in discussing irreversibility of physical systems, this problem still being the most pressing one in statistical mechanics and is still hotly debated at the present time.

How complicated are we?
This book is designed as a text to introduce graduate students in science to the concepts and methods in the ``science of complexity'' which comprises studies in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, sociology, psychology, economics, anthropology, and philosophy. Written from the perspectives of a physicist, definitions are informal; thus a concise definition of a complex system is not given. The concept of a complex system is introduced through examples, and informally described as having ``a large number of interacting parts'' although ``even a few interacting objects can behave in complex ways.'' More precisely, complexity is defined as ``the amount of information necessary to describe a system.'' Another key concept is the phenomenon of emergence which arises when ``the collective behavior [of a complex system] is not readily understood from the behavior of its parts.''

Dynamics of Complex Systems opens with a long chapter (278 pages) of ``introduction and preliminaries'' which surveys iterative maps; thermodynamics and statistical mechanics; activated processes (glasses); cellular automata; statistical fields; computer simulations; information theory; computation; and fractals, scaling and renormalization. It is suggested that this chapter can serve as the basis for a one-semester course. This introductory chapter is followed by eight chapters devoted two each to four different subjects: neural networks, protein folding, biological evolution, and human civilization. In each of these pairs of chapters, the first is more detailed and the second more general. Thus the first of the two chapters on neural networks describes neural network models (Hopfield's attactor models) whereas the second discusses the phenomenon of sleep and models of mind, with similar divisions of labor in the pairs of chapters on protein folding and on biological evolution. In the final chapter, it is noted that ``human civilization is more complex than we are as individuals.''

Alwyn Scott
http://personal.riverusers.com/~rover/ ... Read more

Book Description
The leading authority on system dynamics explains this approach to organizational problem solving, emphasizing simulation models to understand issues such as fluctuating sales, market growth and stagnation, the reliabilityof forecasts and the rationality of business decision-making. The CD includes modeling software from Vensim, ithink, and PowerSim. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (23)

Excelent book
This book is really impressive. Is an eye opener. Must read for Industrial Engineering Students, must have for professors and great addition for a professional looking for new ideas.

System Dynamics brought to real life
"Business Dynamics" is a great book leading the knowledge seeking "fresh" system dynamicist into the field of SD and the experienced system dynamicist can use it as a knowledge pool.

John Sterman removes the theoretical barriers and brings SD to real life as he goes along known complex questions in order to understand them through the use of System Dynamics and Systems Thinking.

Learning and getting more experienced in System Dynamics and the use for daily problem solvingis a dynamic and evolving process of wisdom with lots of feedback and "Business Dynamics" is the right companion in getting deeper insights in order to achieve the goals.

Best regards

Ralf

Excellent
Excellent guide to systems thinking, clear examples, clear thinking and very interesting conclusions reached. highly recommended

buen libro
como parte de la materia lo llevo, me salio mas barato que en mexico y me es util para mi carrera

Amazing
The definitive book on Business dynamics !
It may look dificult to follow, but it isn`t really easy to read and follow !
The cd brings good examples. ... Read more

Book Description
The present volume studies the application of concepts from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to a variety of research topics. Emphasis is on the Maximum Entropy Production (MEP) principle and applications to Geosphere-Biosphere couplings. Written by leading researchers from a wide range of backgrounds, the book presents a first coherent account of an emerging field at the interface of thermodynamics, geophysics and life sciences. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

if you want to understand how Gaia works.
I saw this book reviewed in Nature magazine. It had a rave review there, so I bought a copy. I wasn't dissapointed, this is a reprint of all the seminal papers on the subject of MEP (Maximum Entropy Production). It is a modern version of Schroedinger's famous book - "What is Life".

My only wish is that the book could be a little MORE mathematically complete. ... Read more

Book Description
THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT CLASSIC-REVISED AND EXPANDED

Now Includes Downloadable Forms and Worksheets

Projects are becoming the heart of business. This comprehensive revision of the bestselling guide to project management explains the processes, practices, and management techniques you need to implement a successful project culture within your team and enterprise. Visualizing Project Management simplifies the challenge of managing complex projects with powerful, visual models that have been adopted by more than 100 leading government and private organizations.

In this new Third Edition, the authors-leading thinkers and practitioners in the field-keep you on the cutting edge with a sophisticated approach that integrates project management, systems engineering, and process improvement. This advanced content can help take your career and your organization well beyond the fundamentals.

New, downloadable forms, templates, and worksheets make it easy to implement powerful project techniques and tools.

Includes references to the Project Management Institute Body of Knowledge and the INCOSE Handbook to help you pass:

• The Project Management Professional Certification Exam
• The INCOSE Systems Engineer Certification Exam (CSEP)

"The importance of this excellent book, able to encompass these two key disciplines [systems engineering and project management], cannot be overemphasized."
—Heinz Stoewer, President, INCOSEDownload Description
THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT CLASSIC-REVISED AND EXPANDED Now Includes Downloadable Forms and WorksheetsProjects are becoming the heart of business. This comprehensive revision of the bestselling guide to project management explains the processes, practices, and management techniques you need to implement a successful project culture within your team and enterprise. Visualizing Project Management simplifies the challenge of managing complex projects with powerful, visual models that have been adopted by more than 100 leading government and private organizations. In this new Third Edition, the authors-leading thinkers and practitioners in the field-keep you on the cutting edge with a sophisticated approach that integrates project management, systems engineering, and process improvement. This advanced content can help take your career and your organization well beyond the fundamentals. New, downloadable forms, templates, and worksheets make it easy to implement powerful project techniques and tools. Includes references to the Project Management Institute Body of Knowledge and the INCOSE Handbook to help you pass: The Project Management Professional Certification ExamThe INCOSE Systems Engineer Certification Exam (CSEP)""I recommend this book to all those who aspire to project management [and] those who must supervise it."" Norman R. Augustine, former chairman and CEO Lockheed Martin Corporation ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Pretty Good PM Resource
I am fairly new to the PM role where I am responsible for other's work, so I purchased this book as a reference tool and so far it has helped in terms of having examples that I can start with instead of starting from scratch.
Other than that, I have relied on my leadership and team building skills to meet deadlines which proves to be more important that having the pretty models, charts, etc.

Good Textbook
This book was assigned as THE textbook for my graduate Level Project Management class.It is a good read, great at presenting its ideas, and easy to understand.It unfortunately talks only of a couple of project management techniques vaguely and what examples are included are very short with little or no good background.I'd sell this book as a good starter for those looking to gain understanding in PM, but with the understanding that other books would be needed for true enlightenment in particular areas.

On-time delivery
product came in good condition and on-time.
that was all that I wanted.

Advancing the industry standard
I've followed the maturation of the VPM books now up to version 3 and continue to be impressed by the straight forward approach to project management the authors use.The dual V takes the industry standard to a thrid dimension and truly captures systems of systems development.A must read for any technical project manager.

Visualizing Project Management 3rd Edition
Visualizing Project Management, 3rd Edition is an excellent read! Throughout my career I have led or have been part of projects whereby risk management was defined as risk statusing. Real risk identification and their impacts to projects were ignored. In Visualizing Project Management 3rd Edition, the book focuses on the technical aspects of projects which is critical to project succcess and has a whole chapter dedicated to risk Management (chapter 13, Opportunities and their Risks). This was extremely valuable to me. Now that I have read this book, I am eager to tackle my next project. ... Read more

Product Description

The present book outlines a conceptual framework for modelling and forecasting the dynamics of both growth-limited cities and megacities bringing together experts from several disciplines. The interdisciplinary point of view is particularly stressed. The contributions presented reflect the various interdependencies between structural (physics and mathematics models) and social development (spatial decision making and urban planning models). The volume emphasizes not only the contributions from different disciplines but also pays attention to specific problems like model calibration, data availability and management, case studies and interactions with urban planners. It is the collection of all the contributions of the speakers at the international workshop, The Dynamics of Complex Urban Systems: an interdisciplinary approach held at Monte Verità (Ascona/Switzerland) from 4th to 6th of November 2004.

Customer Reviews (1)

Good but dated
This is an interesting book, a compilation of papers presented in 1993, and, as a result, feels somewhat dated in 2006. The title gives one the sense that it will tackle the very difficult questions of mind and brain from the vantage point of complex adaptive systems. But many of the papers only approach that idea tangentially. The Santa Fe Institute is a terrific place, doing fascinating work, but this book did not live up to my expectations. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume breaks new ground by showing how leading businesses create and implement projects to drive strategy and innovation.Projects are used to coordinate activities with customers and suppliers and ensure that organizations become more dynamic and adaptable. The book extends the resource-based view of the firm to focus on the business lessons learned from the design and production of high-value complex products and systems (CoPS), which have always been project-based. As well as new frameworks and management tools, it provides case studies of high-technology industries--such as telecommunications, flight simulation and medical devices. ... Read more

Book Description

The efficient functioning of modern society depends on the smooth operation of many complex systems which provide products and services. These include transport systems, communication systems, utilities, manufacturing plants, processing plants, hospitals and banks. Such systems are unreliable in the sense that they degrade with age and/or usage and fail when they are no longer capable of delivering the products and services. When a complex system fails, the consequences can be dramatic. It can result in serious economic losses, affect humans and do serious damage to the environment. These failures can be controlled through preventive maintenance actions.

Book Description

Mathematical modeling of human physiopathology is a tremendously ambitious task. It encompasses the modeling of most diverse compartments such as the cardiovascular, respiratory, skeletal and nervous systems, as well as the mechanical and biochemical interaction between blood flow and arterial walls, or electrocardiac processes and the electric conduction into biological tissues. Mathematical models can be set up to simulate both vasculogenesis (the aggregation and organisation of endothelial cells dispersed in a given environment) and angiogenesis (the formation of new vessels sprouting from an existing vessel) that are relevant to the formation of vascular networks, and in particular to the description of tumor growth. The integration of models aimed at simulating the cooperation and interrelation of different systems is an even more difficult task. It calls for the set up of, for instance, interaction models for the integrated cardio-vascular system and the interplay between central circulation and peripheral compartments, models for the mid-long range cardiovascular adjustments to pathological conditions (e.g. to account for surgical interventions, congenital malformations, or tumor growth), models for the integration among circulation, tissue perfusion, biochemical and thermal regulation, models for parameter identification and sensitivity analysis to parameter changes or data uncertaintyand many others. The heart is a complex system in itself, where electrical phenomena are functionally related with the wall deformation. In its turn, electrical activity is related with heart physiology. It involves nonlinear reaction-diffusion processes and provides the activation stimulus to the heart dynamics and eventually the blood ventricular flow that drives the haemodynamics of the whole circulatory system. In fact, the influence is reciprocal, since the circulatory system in turns affects the heart dynamics and may induce an overload depending upon the individual physiopathologies ( for instance the presence of a stenotic artery or a vascular prosthesis).Virtually, all the fields of mathematics have a role to play in this context. Geometry and approximation theory provide the tools for handling clinical data acquired by tomography or magnetic resonance, identifying meaningful geometrical patterns and producing three-dimensional geometrical models stemming from the original patients data. Mathematical analysis, flow and solid dynamics, stochastic analysis are used to set up the differential models and predict uncertainty. Numerical analysis and high performance computing are needed to numerically solve the complex differential models. Finally, methods from stochastic and statistical analysis are exploited for the modeling and interpretation of space-time patterns. Indeed, the complexity of the problems at hand often stimulates the use of innovative mathematical techniques that are able, for instance, to accurately catch those processes that occur at multiple scales in time and space (like cellular and systemic effects), and that are governed by heterogeneous physical laws.

Book Description
Shared Risk is an unparalleled study of how communities at risk respond to major hazards. This major new book explores the elastic boundary between structure and flexibility that enables modern organizations to function effectively under uncertain, dynamic conditions.


Through a comprehensive analysis of earthquake case studies, Louise Comfort shows how communities and organizations cope with dynamic and unpredicted events. Drawing upon the concept of shared risk, she examines the self-organizing processes by which communities act in their own interest to mitigate and reduce risk. Placing shared risk within a theoretical framework consistent with disaster situations, Professor Comfort presents policy-relevant analysis of disaster response systems.


The practical, theoretical and methodological issues involved in the study of shared risk are addressed in the first part of the book which also sets this problem in the global context of seismic risk. This is followed by comparative analysis of eleven different case studies of rapidly evolving response systems following earthquakes. The final part of the volume compares different classes of response systems and presents a preliminary model for a sociotechnical system to mitigate seismic risk and facilitate response when earthquakes occur.


Examining the relationship between information, action and theory and theories of organizational adaptation, this book will be applicable to a wide range of organizational change efforts, as well as being a strong and distinctive contribution to the literature on seismic policy and crisis management. ... Read more

Book Description
...provides professionals and students at all levels with complete,easy-to-understand coverage of the management of complex technicalprojects through systems engineering ... Read more

Book Description
In an attempt to reestablish a firm scientific foundation for contemporary sociology, this innovative collection of essays incorporates current extensions to a systems approach, such as "complex adaptive systems" and aspects of contemporary dynamic systems theory. General problem areas in basic theory and methodology are addressed, and then the book develops to focus on the more empirically relevant core of social theory - sociocultural regulation and control - with concern for adaptive structure changing and structure conserving aspects. In addition, this book is focused on dynamic system processes rather than static structural or functional concepts. ... Read more