The Forgotten Management Guru Who Knows Why Nothing Works
A new book throws fresh light on some of our biggest problems and most pernicious frustrations.
Stafford Beer at the Universität St.Gallen.
Source: Universitätsarchiv St.Gallen
If Stafford Beer is remembered at all today, it’s for a luckless cameo trying to help President Salvador Allende run Chile’s newly nationalized industries in the early 1970s. Back then, Beer was the leading light of a movement known as management cybernetics, a math-heavy approach to studying self-regulation, feedback and decision-making systems. He developed most of the theory and its practice in the steel industry of 1950s Britain and later as a highly regarded consultant.
Allende recruited Beer at the suggestion of some Chilean engineers and managers who had studied his books. Their attempt to run large parts of the economy would likely have failed because the technology at hand — a few hundred telex machines and a rudimentary operations center with projections of hand-drawn charts — wasn’t fit for the scale of the mission. Regardless, it was cut short by the military coup of General Augusto Pinochet in 1973.