Hello there. My name is Chetan Dhruve and I'm the author of the book Why Your Boss is Programmed to be a Dictator. Thanks for reading this book sample.

Here's the backstory.

I had studied Systems Thinking as part of my MBA, and we had done a case study on a low-cost airline called People Express. The airline was extremely successful when it first launched, but folded later.

As part of the study, we were given a software tool that simulated the case. The aim was to prevent the airline from going bust. We tried several things - when demand spiked, we would buy new airplanes. If service levels dropped, we would hire more staff. But whatever we did, something else would go wrong, leading to the collapse of the airline.

The thing was, we were looking at each problem in isolation - analytically. Instead, we should have looked at the problem wholistically, that is, using Systems Thinking. It sounds easy and obvious, but it is actually a profound, fundamental shift in thinking.

The lesson was this: systems matter. Good people in bad systems produce bad results.