I met Walt this morning at National Public Lands Day. I asked him to come on out and chat about his book. He clearly has been thinking deeply about sustainability and demonstrates the kind of "out of the box" problem solving that I talk so much about as the only way to achieve a more sustainable community. I asked him to guest blog and he happily complied! Walt is marketing his book through grassroots and I encourage everyone to check it out. Hopefully, we can arrange to have Walt speak to the community this winter about his ideas. Thanks, Walt! By Walter Sobkiw
Copyright 2008
Feel free to post on any forum and use in any media but credit the author with this content
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/dp/ASIN/0615216307
I did not know while looking out the windows of Cherry Hill West High School some 35 years ago I would be writing this article about a book I wrote. I couldn't spell or form a complete sentence back then and I still can't spell or form a complete sentence but I wrote a book. After West I went to Drexel University and graduated as an Electrical Engineer. Shortly after graduation I began my career in the high tech industries of the day, eventually leaving New Jersey, going to California, then Florida, then back home to Cherry Hill NJ.
It was 1981 in southern California that I was introduced to System Thinking and System Engineering. I had the opportunity to think about future air traffic control, distributed computing, software, architectures, process, and system engineering. The company had a publications department and since it was in southern California, every so often we would get writers from Hollywood to help us form complete thoughts in our high tech documents. They were great and I really miss them and their brilliant work with us engineer's mathematicians, and scientists. Many publication departments disappeared with the introduction of the computer. I talk about this in my book and its negative impact on the entire high tech corporate culture as we lost touch with the liberal arts side of life.
How did you come to write this book is always the first question asked when I meet people. I suppose it is a natural question and helps to break the ice, but the response is long.
Several years ago I developed software to analyze engineering specifications. People quickly started to comment that this software could be applied to almost any document. So I eventually created a generic document analysis version of the software. During this time the movie an "Inconvenient Truth" was released and the poplar media was a buzz with topics on global warming. Out of curiosity I subjected 3 climate change documents to the software to see what would surface. The documents were The Green Paper from the European Union, The Stern Review, and The US Strategic Plan on Climate Change. Much to my surprise and the others who were playing with this software, the documents had real content unlike what was coming from the popular media. Reading the documents confirmed this output from the document analysis tool.
This got me interested in the topic of our future: global warming, alternative energy, sustainable development, infrastructure, etc. I wondered how people could on the one hand try to address our problems and on the other hand fall into rhetoric devoid of any content. I started interacting with a fellow system engineer. He started pursuing this topic years ago. One day while we were exchanging notes I blurted out in frustration that the only way to start to deal with these problems is through system engineering. He had been on that path long before I had that revelation. To make a long story short the theme of this year's conference by the International Council on Systems Engineering (www.incose.org) was "Systems Engineering for the Planet" and I wrote my book.
What is system engineering? Some people try to answer that question by tracing the roots of system engineering. They point to the Bell Telephone Company and say that it was practiced while establishing the massive infrastructure of the telephone system at the start of the last century. Some people will point to the Aerospace companies that gave us modern air travel, satellites, and many other things. I ran into one system engineer who claimed that the founders of the United States were system engineers and he pointed to our system of government and its checks and balances. You can get a degree in system engineering but most system engineers come from other areas including philosophy. My book is about system engineering. I define it and I try to show how to practice it. There is one common element that applies to all system-engineering efforts:
Imagine a place where you create things and make decisions where there are no hidden agendas and all stakeholders are treated equally. How would potential approaches surface, how would they be narrowed and selected, how would decisions be made. What tools and techniques would be used if they were not the greatest moneyed interests, the most politically powerful, or the most dangerous?"
The book is organized into four chapters, an appendix, and a closing. The first chapter is called Bachelor of Science, the second is called Bachelor of Arts, the third is called Doctorate, and the fourth is called The Sustainable Development Project.
The appendix is a paper written in response to a request from President Roosevelt as that generation was pondering what to do after World War II. I wanted to include this paper from our past because it was so fundamental to laying the seeds of my parents' work and my future. It was difficult for me to follow this incredible paper but I found a nice approach where I close with a brief discussion of the book cover and a bibliography. In the bibliography I reference movies, music, television, books and even an ancient text on management.
I knew the book needed to emphasize both art and science and in fact in many ways I wanted to stress more art than science. I used the titles Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts to frame those elements. I added an advanced section, Doctorate, with some darkness and reality so that people could start breaking new ground without deceiving themselves about the challenges. The Sustainable Development Project chapter is a proposal for moving forward.
This is not a textbook even though the title and chapter names may suggest otherwise to some readers. Although I think every university and college curriculum would benefit from its content. I wanted it to be an easy and fast read. So it is short but the topics are very complex and thought provoking. In many ways this is a text that introduces a library of books to come as we follow the basic blue print in this book. There is some darkness and bitterness with what I consider to be a realistic tone however I do end on a positive note as I offer a reasonable proposal for our future that is anchored in our successful previous challenges.
Available at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/dp/ASIN/0615216307
About The Author
Walt has held various engineering high technology positions in the past 30 years. He has published and presented at several technical conferences. Starting from New Jersey, going to California, then Florida and returning back to New Jersey. Walt has a very broad and deep understanding of the state of engineering and technology in the United States. He has taken this experience and digested it into his new book "Sustainable Development Possible with Creative System Engineering" in hopes of providing an effective road map for people engaged in building everything in the next 100 years.
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