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A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, and all around us

Infrastructure is a marvel, meeting our basic needs and enabling lives of astounding ease and productivity that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. It is the physical manifestation of our social contract—of our ability to work collectively for the public good—and it consists of the most complex and vast technological systems ever created by humans.

A soaring bridge is an obvious infrastructural feat, but so are the mostly hidden reservoirs, transformers, sewers, cables, and pipes that deliver water, energy, and information to wherever we need it. When these systems work well, they hide in plain sight. Engineer and materials scientist Deb Chachra takes readers on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, just how much we rely on them—but also whom they work well for, and who pays the costs.

Across the U.S. and elsewhere, these systems are suffering from systemic neglect and the effects of climate change, becoming unavoidably visible when they break down. Communities that are already marginalized often bear the brunt of these failures. But Chachra maps out a path for transforming and rebuilding our shared infrastructure to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable. The cost of not being able to rely on these systems is unthinkably high. We need to learn how to see them—and fix them, together—before it’s too late.

Don’t risk the dire consequences of your work processes becoming obsolete—discover a powerful model for constant, ongoing, enterprise-wide process evolution and optimization.

If you have a great product, but don’t have the operations in place to efficiently and effectively support it—production, manufacturing, sales, finance, human resources, etc.—you won’t succeed. Product innovation is seen as flashier and so gets far more attention, but you can create an enduring competitive advantage by revolutionizing business operations.

The problem is most attempts to improve business operations are reactive, sporadic, and siloed. Tony Saldanha and Filippo Passerini’s Dynamic Process Transformation model provides a living model for constant, ongoing process evolution and optimization.

The authors focus on maximizing three drivers of change. First, “open market rules”—each business process must be run as a separate business, instead of via monolithic mandates coming down from on high. Second, there must be “unified accountability”— outcomes must be clear and consistent across the company, instead of being siloed within departments. And third, there needs to be a “dynamic operating engine,” a methodology to convert the constantly changing business process goals into tactical day-to-day employee actions.

With numerous examples from leading companies, this book shows how to proactively keep business processes across the company from becoming obsolete and take advantage of a neglected key to success.