Beer, Stafford

Anthony Stafford Beer began studying philosophy at University College London , but in 1944 he left his studies in connection with his enlistment in the army. Until 1947 he served in military service in India . In 1949 he was discharged with the rank of captain.

He first became acquainted with the study of operations in the army, where he quickly realized the benefits that it could bring to business. Having joined the United Steel metallurgical company and convincing managers to establish an operations research group, he led the operations research and cybernetics department. In 1959, he published his first book Cybernetics and Management (there is a translation into Russian), based on the ideas of a systematic approach to managing organizations of Norbert Wiener , Warren McCallock, and especially William Ashby .

After gaining a unique practical experience, in 1961, he quit his job at United Steel to start his business as a consultant in partnership with Roger Addison in the field of operations research. The company was named SIGMA ( Science in General Management - “Science in General Management”). Beer left her in 1966 , moving to work with a client of SIGMA - International Publishing Corporation (IPC). Beer was IPC's development director and pioneer in the use of new computer technologies. Also in 1966, he wrote the book Decision and Control . He left IPC in 1970 to work as an independent consultant, which was the result of his ever-increasing interest in social systems.

His largest independent project was never fully completed, despite numerous positive results. In 1971, he was invited by the socialist government of Chile to create a unified computerized system for managing the economy in real time CyberSyn using the Cybernet network. The development of the so-called “Popular Project”, aimed at receiving feedback from citizens on the actions of the government, taking into account the law on the required diversity, was also launched. The government with the help of technological advances, such as television, "can today appeal to the whole mass of the people, as if it spoke with each citizen separately," and the means of communication of the people with the government are limited. To eliminate this contradiction, new means of communication with the government were proposed, namely, a special device, any holder of which could set its indication by moving the arrow on a continuous scale between complete satisfaction and complete dissatisfaction ^[3] . Projects were interrupted after the Pinochet coup in 1973 . Beer continued to work in America , advising the governments of Mexico , Uruguay and Venezuela . He also wrote a four-book series based on his own Viable System Model for modeling organizations: Platform for Change , Designing Freedom , Heart of Enterprise, and The Brain Of The Firm .

In the mid-1970s, Beer abandoned his wealth and moved to central Wales, where he lived in solitude, interested in poetry and art. Since 1980, he settled in his other home in Toronto . He continued to work in his field and in 1994 published the book Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity , dedicated to the synergy of the group, a formal model built on the idea of ​​multifaceted systems for non-hierarchical problem solving.

He was a visiting professor at thirty universities and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sunderland. He was President of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics and award-winning from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering, the System Society of Great Britain, the American Society for Cybernetics and the Society for the Study of Operations of America. In the 1990s, he published one of his latest books on the syntegrity team: a formal model built on the polyhedral idea of ​​non-hierarchical problem solving systems .

Beer was married twice, in 1947 to Cynthia Hannaway and in 1968 to Sally Steadman. He had five sons and three daughters.

Cybernetics Management

Beer was the first to use cybernetics for management, defining management as "the science of effective organization." During the 1960s, Bir wrote many works and was an influential practitioner in cybernetics management . It was during this period that he developed a model of a viable system for diagnosing a malfunction in any existing organizational system. At that time, Forrester discovered the system dynamics , which consists in the fact that the behavior of systems as a whole can be represented and understood through modeling the dynamic responses of the processes occurring in them ^[4] .

Cybernetics management is the application of cybernetic laws to all types of organizations and social institutions created by human beings, and interacting in and between them. This is a theory based on the laws of nature. It addresses issues that every individual who wants to influence an organization must learn to solve to some extent. This theory is not limited to the actions of top managers. Each member of such an organization and each person who, to a greater or lesser extent, communicates or interacts with others, is involved in resolving issues.

• 1959, Cybernetics and Management , English Universities Press
  • Beer St. Cybernetics and production management. / Per. from English V. Ya. Altayev. - M .: Science, 1963. - 276s.
  • Cybernetics and Management = Cybernetics and Management / Stafford Beer; per. English V. Altaev. - [M.]: KomKniga, 2011. - 280 p. ISBN 978-5-484-01272-5 , 978-5-484-01083-7
• 1966, Decision and Control , Wiley, London
  • 1995, Decision and Control: The Meaning of Operational Research and Management Cybernetics . - London: Wiley, 1995 .-- 568 p. ISBN 0471948381
• 1972, Brain Of The Firm , Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, Herder and Herder, USA.
• 1974, Designing Freedom , CBC Learning Systems, Toronto, 1974; and John Wiley, London and New York, 1975. (1995 - ISBN 047195165X )
• 1975, Platform for Change , John Wiley, London and New York. Reprinted with corrections 1978. (1995 - ISBN 0471948403 )
• 1977, Transit ; Poems, CWRW Press, Wales. Limited Edition, Private Circulation.
• 1979, The Heart of Enterprise , John Wiley, London and New York. (1995 - ISBN 0471948373 )
• 1981, Brain of the Firm ; Second Edition (much extended), John Wiley, London and New York. Reprinted 1986, 1988.
  • Beer S. Brain Firm. - M .: Radio and communications, 1993 .-- 416 p. ISBN 5-256-00426-3
  • ... - M.: Librocom, 2009 .-- 416 p. ISBN 978-5-397-00156-4
• 1985, Diagnosing the System for Organizations ; John Wiley, London and New York. Translated into Italian and Japanese. Reprinted 1988, 1990, 1991. (1995 - ISBN 0471951366 )
• 1986, Pebbles to Computer : The Thread; (with Hans Blohm ), Oxford University Press, Toronto.
• 1994, Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity ; John Wiley, Chichester. - 380 p. ISBN 0471944513

• The Writings of Stafford Beer
• Desigining Freedom, 1973

• In memory of Stafford Beer (eng)
• Cybernetics & Society
• Stzfford Beer as a guru for Electronic Russia (rus)
• Stafford Beer and Viable Systems in the 21st Century
• Ototsky Leonid. Stafford Beer and the future of Mankind (works by S. Beer) (neopr.) . Magnitogorsk and surroundings (2004). Circulation date December 6, 2010. Archived August 22, 2011.
• Andy Beckett 's article “Dreams in Santiago” on the Cybersin Project
• LJ community dedicated to the popularization of the ideas of Bira in Russia
• Metaphorum 2007 Conference and the Stafford Beer Heritage of the 21st Century (rus)
• Stafford Beer and new KIS analytical tools (rus)
• Stafford Beer's novel Chronicles of Wizard Prang (eng)
• Portal Metaphorum Group (eng)
• Management Cybernetics Portal (rus / eng)
• Cybersin booth at the Transmediale.08 exhibition in Berlin (eng)