 What do Toyota and AT&T have in common?
All we have to rely on are our wits, fortitude, and common humanity Contemporary life is not chaotic, in the colloquial sense we apply to disaster zones. It is, however, complex and rapidly changing; much more so than life was in the past; even the very near past. But the fact that day-to-day behaviors in Shenzhen and Bangalore have direct and immediate effects on people from Wichita to Strasbourg, from Rio de Janeiro to Sydney, or that unscrupulous lenders and careless borrowers in the United States can upend economic expectations everywhere else in the world, no matter how carefully others have planned, means that there are many more moving parts that affect each other. And from this scale of practical effects, complexity emerges. 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. Its very unpredictability makes it unwise to build systems that take too much away from what human beings do best: look, think, innovate, adapt, discuss, learn, and repeat. 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). But it is time we acknowledge that systems work best by making work human. Trains and planes, telegraph and telephone, all brought many people into the same causal space. The solution to this increased complexity in the late 19th, early 20th century was to increase the role of structure and improve its design. During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, this type of rationalization took the form of ever-more complex managed systems, with crisp specification of roles, lines of authority, communication and control. In business, this rationalization was typified by Fredrick Taylor’s Scientific Management, later embodied in Henry Ford’s assembly line. The ambition of these approaches was to specify everything that needed doing in minute detail, to enforce it through monitoring and rewards, and later to build it into the very technology of work−the assembly line.
 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