Reminds me a bit of Scott Adams thing http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230462610...
It bothers me when ideas are presented without even a nod towards their history. I guess all writers are not obliged to do scholarship like journalists and academics, but I wish the publication would point out that we are not reading journalism right now.
Even if this guy developed this stuff all by himself, the fact that these are not globally original ideas should be acknowledged. Adams' book cheerfully points out that none of his stuff is really new apart from his personal anecdotes.
I think it might be easier to just recognize that an awfully lot of the web isn't any kind of journalism. For instance, this is a reposted blog entry on a site full of "Top X" lists. The context is the disclaimer.
">Even if this guy developed this stuff all by himself, the fact that these are not globally original ideas should be acknowledged. Adams' book cheerfully points out that none of his stuff is really new apart from his personal anecdotes."
Why?
One is a 1300 word blog post, the other is a 257 page book with a major publisher.
It would make for an arduous life if everyone was required to research and/or acknowledge the first recorded instance of every notion they have before sharing.
Such is the nature of professional standards. Just a nod is enough.
It's a great idea, certainly, but this type of thinking has been around for decades. The first major adoption was probably W. Edwards Deming's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming) quality principles that were used to pull Japan out of the post-WWII recession. His ideas on systems thinking and management are still relevant today.
This idea -- that systems thinking is valuable, and how to approach it -- is such a generic concept as to be unattributable. It would be nice to have a nod toward history, certainly, and it would help support his writing; but I just like to see it in the first place. We need more of this.
In fact, Scott Adams' piece of wisdom was written in much the same manner, and with exactly the same source: the writer himself.
Systems thinking has been around for a long, long time and this wisdom is not new. We should just be glad it's coming up again and again, because it is correct, and that's what's important.