September 17, 2020
What Management Needs to Become in an Era of Ecosystems
"As with all management metaphors, talk of business ecosystems has some commentators asking: Is this really new? Weren’t companies always embedded in larger systems, and also made up of internal networks? Systems thinking in management, as pioneered by Hans Ulrich, Peter Gomez, and Fredmund Malik at St. Gallen University (and in America, by Jay Forrester, Russell Ackoff, and Peter Senge) has long been part of business school curricula. Indeed, Peter Drucker himself, decades ago, came up with the term “social ecology” to describe the nature of his work as he studied the workings of organizations and their impacts and integration with society.
What has changed is the technology that has us more connected and immersed in data than ever before. In today’s world of networking and collaboration software, big data, analytics, and AI, managers simply cannot continue to assume a carved-out model of the firm for the convenience of seeing how to manage it. Now that firms’ activities are so intertwined and their successes so interdependent, the old tools and techniques no longer work.
To succeed in the era of platforms and partnerships, managers will need to change practice on many levels. And with the new practices of ecosystem management must come new management theory, also reoriented around a larger-scale system-level view. Both practitioners and scholars can begin by dispensing with mechanistic, industrial-age models of inputs, processes, and outputs. They will have to take a more dynamic, organic, and evolutionary view of how organizations’ capacities grow and can be cultivated."
What Management Needs to Become in an Era of Ecosystems
Posted by ACASA on September 17, 2020 at 10:24 AM in Interesting | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 01, 2013
TYPES OF SYSTEMS
There are four basic types of system depending on whether the parts and the whole can display choice, and therefore, be purposeful.
THE FOUR TYPES OF SYSTEMS

Type of System Model | Parts | Whole | Example | |
Mechanistic | No choice | No choice | Machines | |
Animate | No choice | Choice | Persons | |
Social | Choice | Choice | Corporations | |
Ecological | Choice | No Choice | Nature |
Posted by ACASA on May 1, 2013 at 06:43 AM in Interesting | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 15, 2011
Stafford Beer, Cybernetics and More!
Here are several videos that have Cybernetics as their main topic, as provided to us by Javier Livas. Some have been made using material from Stafford Beer directly. The rest deal mostly with Management Cybernetics as applied to different situations. Included are two major videos each of which last for more than two hours. The first is UNIVERSO KUBERNETES which talks about the evolution of the science of Cybernetics and its implications. The second is THE UNIVERSAL MANAGER which puts together Beer's ideas on management in a single package.
What is Cybernetics?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hjAXkNbPfk
Feedback / Stafford Beer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3yNJPkdtYo
The Intelligent Organization PART I Stafford Beer // Javier Livas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7COX-b3HK50
The Intelligent Organization PART II Stafford Beer // Javier Livas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxomXq-X1M0
The Intelligent Organization Q&A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gk1ayL7_kE
Viable System Model
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d-05pG3pcE
Viable Systems meet Complex Adaptive Systems
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QrPxTUWt8A
Management Cybernetics: Science of Effective Organization
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tMokYFaZMQ
Management Cybernetics & Redesigning Government
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSTIZiNHFvQ
Management Cybernetics & Chaos Theory
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HVRniR3GrQ
Management Cybernetics: The Law of Requisite Variety
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu9yMq4z2cA
Management Cybernetics: The Cybernetic State
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrgRJiJBU2I
Pycho-Cybernetics and Management Cybernetics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VaHRe7L7cc
Law & Cybernetics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLBiudoyDT8
The Human Brain & Cybernetics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYDdJNeUGHM
Stuff, Life & Cybernetics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmDh1SJKGA4
Soros, Popper & Cybernetics
(The Budapest Conferences and Financial Times Videos by George Soros)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8_eIlugO10
Model of a Living Organization
http://youtu.be/dFHQEtPdEV4
The Financial Crisis and Cybernetics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh2jeBRWVXg
Cybernetics vs Status Quo: Ideas from Stafford Beer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgNEZhc6eog
Cybernetics and Systemic Traps
http://youtu.be/X9XYxXSmmoU
The Universe and You
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9AJI6lECIE
The US DOLLAR, a recursive theory of money creation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bo5ogY9Bhw
CAPTAIN of the Brain Explorer Submarine (ALL)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOcSRqohbk
UNIVERSO KUBERNETES
PART ONE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hiUl3He4qE
PART TWO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMuoYu48HY8
PART THREE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPX6xqaQ4Pw
THE UNIVERSAL MANAGER, based on Stafford Beer's Viable System Model // Javier Livas
http://youtu.be/wxp0CQAjUXI
Posted by ACASA on July 15, 2011 at 02:26 PM in Interesting | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 05, 2008
A. Stafford Beer and Project Cybersyn
more equal and responsive than before - a sort of socialist Internet, decades ahead of its time.
Recently, an article was published in New York Times detailing the "Chilean" experiment conducted by Stafford Beer and his colleague for the Allende administration. To read the article click on the following URL: Before '73 coup, Chile tried to find the right software for socialism
Posted by ACASA on April 5, 2008 at 11:24 AM in Interesting | Permalink | Comments (1)
June 15, 2006
Thinking about the Future and Globalization
Forum 2006 keynoter, Dr. Russell Ackoff, discusses his thoughts on the issue of global development at the occasion of his receipt of the Tallberg Foundation / Swedbank Leadership Award.
So much time is currently spent in worrying about the future that the present is allowed to go to hell. Unless we correct some of the world's current systemic deficiencies now, the future is condemned to be as disappointing as the present. My preoccupation is with where we would ideally like to be right now. Knowing this, we can act now so as to constantly reduce the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Then, to a large extent, the future is created by what we do now. Now is the only time in which we can act.
I have found widespread agreement among governmental and organizational executives that their current state is more a product of what their organizations did in the past than a product of what was done to them. Therefore, our future state will be more a product of what we do now than of what is done to us.
If we don't know what state we would be in right now if we could be in whatever state we wanted, how can we possibly know in what state we would like to be in the future? Furthermore, statements
of where we want to be in the future are usually based on forecasts of what the future will be. Such forecasts are inevitably wrong; we cannot identify all the significant changes that will occur in our environments between now and then.
It is for this reason that so many plans are never completely implemented; they are dropped when it becomes apparent that the forecasts on which they are based are false. I was once told by a public planner that only two percent of the public-sector plans produced in my country were ever completely implemented for this and other reasons.
Download ackoffstallbergtalk.pdf
Posted by ACASA on June 15, 2006 at 02:46 PM in Interesting | Permalink | Comments (1)
October 21, 2005
Dancing With Systems
By Donella Meadows
Versions of this piece have been published in Whole Earth, winter 2001 and The Systems Thinker, Vol. 13, No. 2 (March 2002).
The Dance
1. Get the beat.
2. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
3. Expose your mental models to the open air.
4. Stay humble. Stay a learner.
5. Honor and protect information.
6. Locate responsibility in the system.
7. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
8. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
9. Go for the good of the whole.
10. Expand time horizons.
11. Expand thought horizons.
12. Expand the boundary of caring.
13. Celebrate complexity.
14. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.
People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.
To read this article, click on the link: Dancing With Systems
Posted by ACASA on October 21, 2005 at 02:39 PM in Interesting | Permalink | Comments (2)
September 16, 2005
Essay in Honor of Dr. Aron Katsenelinboigen
Vera Zubarev writes about Aron Katsenelinboigen - whom she
describes as friend, father, and teacher - and discusses their conversation
"which never stops."
Dr. Aron Katsenelinboigen was professor emeritus of operations and information management.
Born in the
Dr. Vera Zubarev is a bilingual Russian-English poet, writer, and scholar who
teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages at the Universityof
To read the essay, please click on the following link: My Journey by Vera Zubarev
Posted by ACASA on September 16, 2005 at 03:39 PM in Interesting | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 29, 2005
Design For A Self-Regenerating Organization
Dr. Michael C Geoghegan ([email protected]) and Dr. Paul
Pangaro ([email protected])
Ashby Centenary Conference
March 4-6, 2004, University of Illinois, Urbana
Ashby’s Design for a Brain [Ashby 1952] comprises a formal description of the
necessary and sufficient conditions for a system to act ‘like a brain,’ that
is, to learn in order to remain viable in a changing environment, and to ‘get
what it wants’. Remarkably, Ashby gives a complete, formal specification of
such a system without any dependency on how the system is implemented. In this
presentation the authors will argue how Ashby’s formalisms can be applied to
human organizations.
All organizations seek to successfully carry out
transactions that achieve their goals and assert their identity, whether to educate
college students for employment, to govern a territory fairly, or to make money
for shareholders. An organization’s transactions are predicated on agreements,
and agreements in turn are based on conversations in a shared language. Thus human
organizations are delimited by their operation in the domain of language, and
Ashby’s ‘essential variables’ are the ‘shared truths’ of an
organization—perturbed by the environment, regulated by employees’ actions, and
carried in its language.
To read this article, click on the link: Design For A Self-Regenerating Organization.
Posted by ACASA on June 29, 2005 at 11:17 AM in Interesting | Permalink | Comments (0)