How Many Grapes Went into the Wine: Stafford Beer on the Art and Science of Holistic Management

by Roger Harnden (Editor), Allenna Leonard (Editor)

Overview

A collected work of Stafford Beer's papers, some previously unpublished, spanning 35 years. Presents a coherent vision to guide strategy and manage change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780471942962
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	07/19/1994
Series:	Series
Pages:	420
Product dimensions:	6.26(w) x 9.70(h) x 1.19(d)

About the Author

Roger Harnden is the editor of How Many Grapes Went into the Wine: Stafford Beer on the Art and Science of Holistic Management, published by Wiley.

Allenna Leonard is an American cyberneticist, consultant and Director of Team Syntegrity Inc. of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, internationally, specializing in the application of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model and Syntegration.

Table of Contents

Partial table of contents:

Holism and the Frou-Frou Slander.

BEGINNINGS: INTERDISCIPLINARY APPLICATION OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH TO TANGIBLE PROBLEMS.

A Technique for Standardizing Massed Batteries of Control Charts.

The Mechanical Simulation of Stochastic Flow.

The Impact of Cybernetics on the Concept of Industrial Organization.

CYBERNETICS: A NEW WORLD VIEW.

The World, the Flesh and the Metal: 1964 Stephenson Lecture.

Towards the Cybernetic Factory.

COMPLEXITY IN HUMAN AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS.

Cybernetics of National Development: The Zaheer Foundation Lecture, New Delhi, India.

Death Is Equifinal: Eighth Annual Ludwig von Bertalanffy Memorial Lecture.

Indexes.

Editorial Reviews

Stafford Beer, the founder of management cybernetics, is an international consultant in the management sciences, and is currently President of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics. The papers in this volume, dating from the mid-1950s on, trace Beers conceptual journey and his contribution to the tradition of systems thinking. Beer's early experiments on the self-organizing properties of biological systems helped pave the way towards later connectionist models and neural-net computer architecture. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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