Work
Stafford Beer worked in the fields of operational research, cybernetics and management science. He had become aware of operational research while being in the army, and he was quick to identify the advantages it could bring to business.
In the late 1950s, he published his first book about cybernetics and management, building on the ideas of Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and especially William Ross Ashby for a systems approach to the management of organisations.
In the 1970s, he also wrote a series of books (the last three focussing upon his own Viable System Model for organisation modelling):
In the 1990s, he published one of his last books about Team Syntegrity: a formal model, built on the polyhedra idea of systems for non-hierarchical problem solving.
Read more about this topic: Anthony Stafford Beer
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“I did nothing but work. I made work my hobby. I was lucky that way.”
—Mary Roebling (1905–1994)
“As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“At each minute we are crushed by the idea and the feeling of time. And there are only two ways to escape this nightmare, Mto forget it: pleasure and work. Pleasure wears us out. Work fortifies us. Let’s choose.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)