Stafford Beer

“Anthony Stafford Beer was a British theorist, consultant and professor at the Manchester Business School. He is best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics.”

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“According to Jackson (2000) ‘Beer was the first to apply cybernetics to management, defining cybernetics as the science of effective organization.’ In the 1960s and early 1970s ‘Beer was a prolific writer and an influential practitioner’ in management cybernetics. It was during that period that he developed the viable system model, to diagnose the faults in any existing organizational system. In that time Forrester invented systems dynamics, which ‘held out the promise that the behavior of whole systems could be represented and understood through modeling the dynamical feedback process going on within them’”