Guru Madhavan > Quotes

“THE CORE OF the engineering mind-set is what I call modular systems thinking. It’s not a singular talent, but a mélange of techniques and principles.”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“Engineers help create solution spaces—suites of possibilities that offer new choices, conveniences, and comforts—that redefine our standard of living.”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“As the old joke goes, an extroverted engineer is someone who looks at the other person’s shoes while talking, whereas an introvert looks at his own.”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“VARANASI TRAFFIC is shambolic. It’s a humbling reminder that the British drive on the left side of the road and we (Indians) drive on what’s left of the road. “The traffic is not terrible at all,” wrote novelist Geoff Dyer. “It is beyond any idea of terribleness. It is beyond any idea of traffic.”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“There are just as many ways to practice engineering as there are to achieve inner peace and harmony.”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“In the United States, for instance, recent estimates suggest that less than 4 percent of the total population are engineers who disproportionately help create jobs for the remainder.”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“A structured systems-level thinking process would consider how the elements of the system are linked in logic, in time, in sequence, and in function—and under what conditions they work and don’t work.”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“good engineers know how to apply constraints to help achieve their goals. Time constraints on engineers fuel creativity and resourcefulness. Financial constraints and the blatant physical constraints hinging on the laws of nature are also common, coupled with an unpredictable constraint—namely, human behavior.”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“Implementation of better standards and tools of interoperability could help improve health care efficiency and reduce wasted expenditures, to take one example. “My pizza parlor is more thoroughly computerized than most of health care,” notes medical quality expert Donald Berwick.”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“Even the word “efficiency” can become vague. Its context defines whether it’s pursued as the technique for a target or the target for a technique.”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“On running marathons, “anyone can do it, you know,” Collins says. “All it takes is persistence . . . just like engineering.”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“PowerPoint is strangely adept at disguising the fragile foundations of a proposal, the emptiness of a business plan;”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“Most of the intractability, as Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber wrote in their 1973 paper, “is that of defining problems (of knowing what distinguishes an observed condition from a desired condition) and of locating problems (finding where in the complex causal networks the trouble really lies).”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“By missing a university education, I failed to learn my own limitations,” he once said. “It made it possible for me to do things that had never been done before.” His brilliance was in liberating himself from specialization that allowed him to transfer concepts from musical space to aerospace and then to hydrospace,”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“engineering projects could have benefits beyond infrastructure, namely providing access to better education, jobs, agriculture, and health.”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“Deliberation without work is empty,” Levine notes, “but work without deliberation is blind.”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“They needed jobs. The labor market for engineers in the early 1950s was lukewarm, if not brutal.”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“It’s inevitable that when these six concepts are put into practice and refined, additional considerations will present themselves”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“Combining efficiency, vagueness, vulnerability, safety, maintenance, and resilience”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“ATM failure rates have significantly declined over the past several years, thanks to concurrent error detection algorithms in the software that processes transactions,”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“If something is at stake, the human minds get ignited and the working capacity gets enhanced manifold,”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

“There’s an efficiency argument for maintenance, a resilience consideration in safety, and vulnerabilities lurking within vagueness. And similarly, maintenance and safety contribute to efficiency, just as their deficiency can affect vagueness, vulnerability, and resilience. Yet again, the tendency to excessively emphasize hardness—and related problem-solving—can fester into softness, messiness, and, ultimately, wickedness.”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“Engineering approaches to wicked problems can be realized only through multiple criteria. The friction among six concepts - efficiency, vagueness, vulnerability, safety, maintenance, and resilience - can guide our solutions, resolutions, and dissolutions. Wicked problems are not two-sided issues; they are six-sided issues. An acceptable solution, resolution, or dissolution should go through all six filters.”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“The essence of a good technology is that it’s intuitive, and it evolves. Ideally, you don’t even want to know it’s there.”
― Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think