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:
“People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly.”
—Andy Warhol (1928–1987)
“Let’s holler and ask him if he won’t prescribe
For all humanity a complete rest
From all this wagery. But what’s the use
Of asking any sympathy of him?
That class of people don’t know what work is....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)