I might have been crude but I was trying to make a serious point. The point of the essay was that making decisions to optimise one particular aspect of a system (such as give sales guys inducements) will, according to the notion of complex adaptive systems, change the system in ways that cannot be predicted (hence the ring of fire analogy).

Therefore taking a command and control view and optimisng a process might give you short term gain, but in the long term may end making you less resilient and adaptive.

There are lots of examples in ecology, like the everglades in Florida, where we are now paying the price of past attempts to try to optimise a part of the system, which in the longer term created more difficult and costly problems to deal with. Unfortunately, we tend to persist with the known methods for too long, until the system is near collapse because looking at the bigger picture, is damn hard work and requires real collaboration

Regards

Paul