The Ackoff Center Weblog provides an opportunity to keep up with the latest research in Systems Thinking. It is also a forum where you can interact with others in the field and share your own experiences.
Russell L. Ackoff (1919-2009) was an important early proponent of the field of operations research, and remained a tireless advocate for an expansive vision of what the field could be. Ackoff was a founding member of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA), and served the organization as its fifth president. Ackoff was also an author of Introduction to Operations Research (1957), the field’s first textbook written as such. Throughout his time in OR, Ackoff insisted on working on practical problems of management, and maintained ongoing relationships with a number of clients, including Anheuser-Busch, which he collaborated with for decades. Ackoff resisted the confinement of his work to any particular methodology, and remained deeply concerned with problems of ethics and social responsibility. Because OR had become increasingly defined by its mathematical methdology, Ackoff became disillusioned with the subject, and turned instead to what he called Social Systems Science. In the 1970s he would sever his relationship with OR altogether, declaring the field dead.
Through the cooperation of Bill Bellows, John Pourdehnad and the Ackoff family, we are pleased to offer these videos for your viewing.
2003 Ackoff Seminar At Huntington Beach - 4 Videos
2004 A Day with Russell Ackoff - 5 Videos
2005 A Day with Russell Ackoff - 3 Videos
2006 Fourth Annual Lecture by Russell Ackoff - 2 Videos
Schools must steer away from 'one size fits all' approach
The late business guru, Russell Ackoff, famously said, “It’s better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
At a time when many districts seem to be focused on doing the wrong thing right by working to raise test scores to the exclusion of anything else, we’re taking a different approach at Anaheim Union High School District — building a bridge to the future so that students can achieve their unique potential based on their passions and talents. We called it the “Unlimited You.”
Michael Matsuda
We live in a time when economists predict some 65 percent of the jobs that current K-12 students will hold haven’t yet been invented. Locally, economist Wallace Walrod of the Orange County Business Council has warned that Orange County will need to better prepare a pipeline of talent to backfill over 100,000 white collar jobs lost to retirement with what he calls “new collar” jobs.
