David Peter Stroh, a founding partner of Bridgeway Partners (www.bridgewaypartners.com), is internationally recognized for his work in enabling leaders to apply systems thinking to achieve breakthroughs around chronic, complex problems and to develop strategies which improve system-wide performance over time. He is the author of the new book Systems Thinking for Social Change: A Practical Guide for Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results (Chelsea Green, 2015).

Chris Brogan provides simple plans and projects for business success. He is CEO of Owner Media Group, a sought after public speaker, and the New York Times bestselling author of nine books and working on his tenth. Ask him about it!

Chris lives in northern Massachusetts. His better half is Jacqueline Carly. Between the two of them, they have three kids, and love to explore many challenging and exciting hobbies and pastimes.

Larry Wall is a linguist, computer scientist, and community organizer. Larry is the creator of the Perl programming language along with many other useful software tools. Perl’s usefulness led to its popularity, which in turn led to a large community of developers and maintainers.

We talk about the role of programming languages in systems, the evolution of Perl itself, and then explore the nature of the community that organized around Perl and its creator.

On August 14th I had the pleasure to speak at the 11th Podcamp Pittsburgh. As you have seen, System Smarts had a long period with no new episodes from March 2016 until August. I call this this my “dark period,” and I was eager to start publishing episodes again.

The topic of my talk was fitting for me, restarting your podcast after an absence. This gave me two targets to hit by the same date: preparing a conference talk and actually relaunching System Smarts. Hoo boy! Nothing like accountability.

Happily, I accomplished both which allows me to give you a peek behind the scenes of System Smarts and its recent relaunch. This episode is the audio from my talk.

I’d like to thank Mike and Missy Sorg and their cadre of helpers for organizing Podcamp Pittsburgh, the longest running podcamp conference. You can catch replays of all the talks at podcamppittsburgh.com, including Melinda Helt and me pinch-hitting for the Blogging 201 session.

Podcamp also had a lot of great sponsors including Point Park University who hosted us, BigBig, LibSyn, BluBrry, Pair Networks, Stream Pittsburgh, Work Hard Pittsburgh, Sorgatron Media, Bold Pittsburgh, Lyft, and Commonwealth Printing. It wouldn’t have happened without their support, so thank them if you get a chance.

John Melley is a Voice Actor and Business Audio Production Specialist from Boston, Massachusetts. John is the Production Director for Boston's award winning Mix 104.1 (WBMX) radio station.

John is known throughout the Boston area and nationally for the great character voices he uses in commercials, promotions and announcements. John was recently heard on the TV commercials for the Jerry Seinfeld Production: “Long Story Short” Starring Colin Quinn. He has performed characters for Atari video games, audio books, corporate training, website audio. John is the creator and host of the Voice Over Marketing Podcast and you can listen and subscribe to it at Voice Over Marketing Podcast.com

Hello and welcome back to season two of System Smarts. Season one was awesome and I’ll keep up the momentum in season two with another great line up of guests.

Over the next few months you’ll hear from scientists, artists, engineers, bee keepers, best-selling authors, and many more. Season two kicks off with a voice that you’ve heard on dozens of other podcasts, although you may not know it.

I am still scheduling the latter part of the season, so if you know someone with a unique system you’d like to hear on the show, let me know!

As a special bonus, there will be a series of previews of the new System Design course that I’ll be releasing later this summer. I am really excited about the course and eager to hear your feedback.

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization - Peter M. Senge