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.
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Famous quotes containing the word work:
“O dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious!
Living or dying thou hast fulfill’d
The work for which thou wast foretold
To Israel, and now ly’st victorious
Among thy slain self-kill’d
Not willingly, but tangl’d in the fold
Of dire necessity”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“To deny the need for comprehensive child care policies is to deny a reality—that there’s been a revolution in American life. Grandma doesn’t live next door anymore, Mom doesn’t work just because she’d like a few bucks for the sugar bowl.”
—Editorial, The New York Times (September 6, 1983)
“So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle, the Irish question, for instance,—the English question why did I not say? Their natures are subdued to what they work in. Their “good breeding” respects only secondary objects.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)