General Systemantics (retitled to Systemantics in its second edition and The Systems Bible in its third) is a systems engineering treatise by John Gall in which he offers practical principles of systems design based on experience and anecdotes. It is offered from the perspective of how not to design systems, based on system engineering failures. The primary precept of the treatise is that large complex systems are extremely difficult to design correctly despite best intentions, so care must be taken to design smaller, less-complex systems and to do so with incremental functionality based on close and continual touch with user needs and measures of effectiveness. Title origin The term systemantics is a commentary on prior work by Alfred Korzybski called General Semantics which conjectured that all systems failures could be attributed to a single root cause—a failure to communicate. Dr. Gall observes that, instead, system failure is an intrinsic feature of systems. He thereby derives the term 'General Systemantics' in deference to the notion of a sweeping theory of system failure, but attributed to an intrinsic feature based on laws of system behavior. He observes as a side-note that system antics also playfully captures the concept that systems naturally "act up." Contents of the book Background Premise Systems in general work poorly or not at all. This is more a universal observation than a law. The origin of this observation is traced back via: Murphy's Law that "if anything can go wrong, it will", Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics notion of failure's root cause being a communication problem, Humorist Stephen Potter's One-upmanship on ways to "game" the system for personal benefit, Historian C. Northcote Parkinson's principle called Parkinson's Law -- "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" Educator Lawrence J. Peter's widely cited Peter Principle -- "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence ... in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties ... Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence." Scope By "systems", the author refers to those that "...involve human beings, particularly those very large systems such as national governments, nations themselves, religions, the railway system, the post office..." though the intention is that the principles are general to any system. Additionally, the author observes. Everything is a system. Everything