Matthew Anderson's Colleagues at Plus Sigma
Matthew Anderson's Contact Details
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Alexandria, Virginia, United States
Plus Sigma
Matthew Anderson's Company Details
Our firm was founded on the belief that too many solutions presented by consultants and management are short sighted and don't consider systems outside the domain where the solutions are implemented. We created a firm to offer solutions which were positive sum, that is the problem is solved and the system as a whole benefits. This is in contrast to zero-sum solutions; for instance, when sales solves its customer attrition by punting to advertising or when a company increases its margins by squeezing those of suppliers.A long line of executives in management and engineering have stressed systems thinking for long term solutions. These include Peter Senge, Johannes Ridderstrom, Russell Ackoff, Jay Forrester, Peter Drucker, and Claude Shannon. These revolutionary thinkers have challenged standard tradeoffs to arrive at new solutions that make processes better, transforming business costs into business savings and competitive edge. Most importantly they highlighted the importance of unmeasurables, of creativity, humanity, community, collaboration, and decentralization, and bemoaned the focus on hierarchy, price, and margins in corporations.If your industry is increasingly forced to make tough choices between opposing priorities, or if your attempts to correct bottlenecks in a supply chain backfire within a year or two, or if new business models and web 2.0 are forcing rethinking of your business structure, then a broad look at the systems involved is necessary.In addition to solving novel organizational systems problems, we also approach engineering problems in the same way. We have innovated in numerous areas, including desalination, human-computer interaction, auto-routing and queueing, embedded architectures, and control system design.Sometimes business solutions require both a hard engineering component and a systems management component. Plus Sigma excels in both of these areas and is particularly good at rethinking practices from the fundamentals.