| Stafford Beer |
Limousines in Anthony |
Website Links For Anthony |
Information AboutStafford Beer |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT ANTHONY STAFFORD BEER | |
| 1926 births | |
| 2002 deaths | |
| alumni of university college london | |
| cyberneticists | |
| old whitgiftians | |
| operations researchers | |
| systems scientists | |
|
BIOGRAPHY Beer was born in London . He started a degree in philosophy at University College London , but left in 1944 to join the army. He saw service in India and stayed there until 1947 . In 1949 , he was demobilized, having reached the rank of captain. He joined United Steel and persuaded the management to found an operational research group, the Department of Operations Research and Cybernetics, which he headed. In 1961 he left United Steel to start an operational research consultancy in partnership with Roger Eddison called SIGMA (Science in General Management). Beer left SIGMA in 1966 to work for a SIGMA client, the International Publishing Corporation (IPC). He was appointed development director at IPC and pushed for the adoption of new computer technologies. Beer left IPC in 1970 to work as an independent consultant, focusing on his growing interest in social systems. In 1970 Beer was approached by Salvador Allende 's elected Socialist Government Of Chile to develop a national real-time computerised system Cybersyn to run the entire Chilean Economy . This project was never completed. When Allende was removed from power by General Augusto Pinochet 's 1973 Coup , the Cybersyn project was abandoned. Beer continued to work in the Americas, consulting for the governments of Mexico , Uruguay and Venezuela . In the mid 1970 s, Beer renounced material possessions and moved to mid- Wales where he lived in an almost austere style, developing strong interests in poetry and art. In the 1980 s he established a second home on the west side of downtown Toronto and lived part of the year in both residences. Beer kept active with work in his field Beer was a visiting professor at almost thirty universities and received honorary doctorates from the University Of Leeds , the University of St. Gallen, the University Of Sunderland and the University of Valladolid. He was president of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics and received awards from the Royal Swedish Academy for Engineering Sciences, the United Kingdom Systems Society, the Cybernetics Society , the American Society for Cybernetics, and the Operations Research Society Of America . He was married twice, in 1947 to Cynthia Hannaway and in 1968 to Sallie Steadman. His partner for the last twenty years of his life was Dr Allenna Leonard, a fellow cybernetician. Beer had five sons and three daughters. WORK Staford Beer worked in the fields of Operational Research , Cybernetics and management sceince. He had become aware of operational research while in the army and he was quick to identify the advantages it could bring to business. Late 1950s he published his first book about cybernetics and management, building on the ideas of Norbert Wiener , Warren McCulloch and especially William Ross Ashby for a systems approach to the management of organisations. In the 1970s he also wrote a series of books (the last three focussing upon his own Viable System Model for organisation modeling): In the 1990s he published one of his last books about Team Syntegrity: a formal model, built on the polyhedra idea of systems for non-hierarchical problem solving. LITERATURE Stafford Beer wrote several books:
An audio file of his talk "Forty Years of Cybernetics" to the Cybernetics Society is available from their website. About Stafford Beer
SEE ALSO
EXTERNAL LINKS
Organizations
|
|
|