systems-thinking
(6)
Michel A de Kemmeter
A stone-restoration entrepreneur became a systems thinker by following one persistent question: what valuable things does conventional accounting leave out? His answer now spans books, classrooms, a Brussels think tank and experiments in regenerative business.
Elizabeth Stone
Elizabeth Stone is the Chief Product and Technology Officer of Netflix, where she leads the company's product, engineering, data and design organizations. An economist by training with a PhD from Stanford and a bachelor's from MIT, she moved from equity derivatives trading and economic consulting into technology leadership roles at Nuna and Lyft before joining Netflix in 2020. She became Netflix's first CTO in 2023 and was elevated to CPTO in 2026, and is known for a data-driven, systems-thinking approach to building high-performance teams.
Luca Dellanna
Luca Dellanna is an Italian author, management consultant, and systems thinker based in Turin, who has written 10+ books on ergodicity, risk management, behavioral psychology, and long-term strategy. Best known for making the concept of ergodicity accessible to a broad audience, he advises organizations on operational excellence and cultural change, teaches at the University of Genoa, and has been featured on EconTalk twice. His work sits at the intersection of probability theory, human behavior, and practical management wisdom.
John Cutler
John Cutler is a product thinker, writer, and systems overthinker best known for The Beautiful Mess newsletter (59,000+ subscribers) and the viral concept of the 'feature factory.' A college dropout turned touring musician turned video game creator turned product executive, he has written nearly 1,000 pieces on the messy intersection of product, people, and organizational design. He co-authored Amplitude's North Star Playbook, spent years as a product evangelist coaching teams worldwide, and is now Head of Product at Dotwork — a platform for building product operating systems.
Laura Nolan
Laura Nolan is a Principal Engineer at Stanza Systems, a veteran Site Reliability Engineer, and one of tech's most credible voices on autonomous weapons ethics. After five years at Google - where she contributed to the seminal O'Reilly SRE book and resigned over Project Maven - and seven years at Slack as Senior Staff Engineer, she brings deep technical authority to both the reliability engineering world and the global debate over killer robots. Based in rural Ireland, she speaks at SREcon, QCon, and TED stages alike, writes the Responsible Computing newsletter on Substack, and holds seats on the USENIX Board and the SREcon Steering Committee.
Lorin Hochstein
Lorin Hochstein is a Staff Software Engineer specializing in reliability at Airbnb, and one of the most respected voices in incident analysis and resilience engineering. Known for rewriting Chaos Monkey at Netflix, co-authoring the O'Reilly book 'Ansible: Up and Running', and contributing to the 'Learning from Incidents' community, he bridges the gap between academic complexity theory and real-world software operations. His blog 'Surfing Complexity' and conference talks challenge engineers to think more deeply about why systems fail and how humans make sense of them.