Ackoff’s New Book: Management f-Laws
Posted on February 9, 2007 Comments (3)
Russell Ackoff is in London promoting his new book: Management f-Laws (see previous post: Ackoff’s F-laws: Common Sins of Management). A BBC article captures some of some of the great ideas from one of his talks (more articles… by Ackoff). How to avoid the fatal F-Laws by Peter Day:
“The average life of a US corporation is only 11-and-a-half years, the rate of bankruptcy is increasing very year. There’s a great deal of evidence that we don’t know how to manage organisations very effectively.
“The F-Laws are simply based on observations over the year about regularities which are destructive to organisations.”
As always he is insightful and not afraid to shake up conventional wisdom.
He was a friend and associate of the still-influential management expert W Edwards Deming, the man who took quality to Japan and then saw it bounce back to his native US. Russell Ackoff thinks that, imprisoned in centuries of Western education which values only analytic thought, most people cannot do the “synthetic” thinking that sees an organisation as an intermoving whole. Analytic thinking uses research and experimentation. Design is the way that synthetic thinking operates, putting things together rather than taking them apart.
Related: systems thinking posts – Learning, Systems and Improvement – From Mechanistic to Social Systemic Thinking
3 Responses to “Ackoff’s New Book: Management f-Laws”
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February 7th, 2008 @ 12:10 am
My main suggestion is to read excellent books regardless of when they were written. The Human Side of Enterprise by Douglas McGregor, Fourth Generation Management by Brian Joiner, and many others might not be new but they offer more than almost any new books you will find…
May 13th, 2009 @ 6:25 pm
“Why-questions, about objects called systems, cannot be answered by the use of analysis… The product of explanation is understanding… The product of analysis is how things work, never why they work the way they do…”
October 31st, 2009 @ 2:05 pm
Russell Ackoff understood to create effective management systems the human element must be at the heart. He firmly believed in respect for people and his management ideas built on providing the opportunity for people to flourish…