 What do Toyota and AT&T have in common?
These two features−the global scale of interdependence of human action, and the systematic acceleration of innovation, make contemporary life a bit like a slow motion disaster, in one important respect. That is why we have seen many more systems take on a loose, human centric model in the last decade and a half: from the radical divergence of Toyota’s production system from the highly structured model put in place by Henry Ford, to the Internet’s radical departure from the AT&T system that preceded it, and on to the way Wikipedia constructs human knowledge on the fly, incrementally, in ways that would have been seen, until recently, as too chaotic ever to work (and are still seen so be many).
 They are examples of systems with different levels of control, more useful when contrasted than compared
 They are examples of systems with different levels of control, more useful when contrasted than compared  They both have tried to establish loosely-coupled systems, to varying degrees of success  They are both run in newer, more flexible systems, with authority at edges of the system  They are both fading names in the tech world in contemporary times