Tarek Heggy has a long article at Winds of Change about what is needed to revive Arab culture.He discusses the need to accept criticism and to base change on valid criticism and evaluation.
I wrote him a letter suggesting a slightly different approach based on similar principles but bypassing cultural markers and taking humans out of the equation.
Here is what I said:
Perhaps teaching control theory would be the best thing you could do. Not necessarily the mathematics but in words. That puts the ideas outside the realm of people.
Feed back is telling the controller what results it is getting. Comparison with the desired results shows how much change/effort is necessary to get the desired results.
If Arabia learned control theory from childhood it would have a great advantage over the west for a while.
The essence of control is having a desired state and measuring the error and then deciding what to do about it. Which as you pointed out is the essence of modern management. I wonder if MBAs learn control theory?
You also learn about not trying to force a system to change faster than it is able. That leads to instability. We can save that for the second year. :-)
It is possible also to measure the system's capacity for change by giving it small endurable shocks (or just measuring its response to noise). That will be the third year.
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Arab Mind, Arab Reformation, Management Theory, Control Theory