A Shock To The System

The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating serious chemical accidents. The agency's board members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. CSB investigations look into all aspects of chemical accidents, including physical causes such as equipment failure as well as inadequacies in regulations, industry standards, and safety management systems.

A Shock to the System

Forrester upended the conventional thinking in management, redefined what growth means, and invented system dynamics. In this excerpt from The Age of Heretics, Art Kleiner describes how the MIT Sloan School professor did it.

In the 1960s, the values of the industrial era were questioned, loudly and publicly, through the computer modeling work of Jay W. Forrester, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Forrester could not be ignored because he was one of the most accomplished engineers alive. He had invented the addressing system for digital computer memory.

A few weeks ago, my son turned 1. Looking back over the last year, I file most of it under: "You think you know ... but you have no idea." (MTV's Diary, anyone?) No matter how prepared you think you are, new parenthood is a shock to the system.

Feifei This is The English We Speak from BBC Learning English. We've discovered that 'a shock to the system' means experiencing 'a sudden and unpleasant change'. It's what Rob's experienced coming back to work today. So, I guess your holiday is already a distant memory Rob.

This exploratory study uses a punctuated equilibrium paradigm (PEP) framework to examine the impact and adaptation of an entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) to the COVID-19 pandemic at the organizational and ecosystem level. The aim is to provide guidance to EEs on ways to adapt to future external shocks.

Based on the findings, the authors propose an emerging model of EEs that extends the traditional clustering model focused on geography to account for more digitally distributed entrepreneurial clusters. However, the results, based on an in-depth study of one ecosystem, may not be fully generalizable to all EEs.

Cannice, M.V., Park, S.-Y. and Lee, J.Y. (2023), "A shock to the system: entrepreneurial ecosystem resilience and adaptation in a global pandemic", Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 30-57. -04-2022-0197

When the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020, the institution, which had very limited experience providing online instruction, sent students home, and switched to delivering fully remote courses within less than one week. Like most other academic institutions, this was a significant shock to the teaching and learning environment; faculty rapidly learned new tools and tried new techniques to teach, engage, and interact with students. After the semester ended, the department formed teams of faculty to devote a portion of the summer to gathering lessons learned from the spring term, examining the literature about online education, and providing recommendations for the fall term. These activities led to discussions about how well the existing teaching and learning model applied to the vastly different environment of online versus in-person education. This inspired the faculty to a thorough examination of the living document.

In general," Draganski concludes, "there are implications of our findings for both basic and clinical neurosciences. Psychiatrists will have stronger arguments to make use of ECT in mood disorder patients refractory," or resistant, "to other forms of treatment, and basic neuroscientists will take on the challenge to investigate the neurobiological mechanisms of ECT at molecular, cellular and systems levels." More information: Electroconvulsive therapy-induced brain plasticity determines therapeutic outcome in mood disorders, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences vol. 111 no. 3, 1156-1161, doi:10.1073/pnas.1321399111Journal information:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 041b061a72