This lecture poses two questions:
A pandemic similar to COVID-19 was predicted by the World Health Organization in 2015. Imagine if you were an executive at a company in and impacted industry, an airline, a hotel, a theme park, a restaurant chain...
Q1: If you exactly predicted the COVID-19 virus in 2015, what would you do? How would you change your company to prepare for this threat?
We should expect more pandemics. The students graduate-level engineers in my class may have 50-year career-spans, and will need to find innovative ways to address these problems. With this as a landscape...
Q2: What is the purpose of business, and the products and services they create?
The lecture continues, and poses how might Systems Thinking provides guidance on how to understand the source of these problems.
Covering similar topics: I was interviewed by Nina Dar, of Cheeky Monkey in Manchester England, on topics ranging from Adam Smith to Henry Ford to Digital Twins, and Sustainability.
References:
Klaus Schwab’s article for the World Economic Forum providing his definition of Industry 4.0:
Finally, a good video on the systemic impacts of the Industrial Revolutions, from Ian Goldin. After reading his book, The Butterfly Defect, I dramatically changed the structure of the course to discuss the impacts of pandemics and climate change.