Download or read book The Viable System Model written by Raul Espejo and published by . This book was released on 1989-09-08 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book concerns the management of social organizations, offering ways to think about complex situations. It will be of interest to management scientists, organization experts, information scientists and computer experts.
Download or read book Organizational Systems written by Raul Espejo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organizational Systems clarifies the application of cybernetic ideas, particularly those of Beer's Viable System Model, to organizational diagnosis and design. Readers learn to appreciate the relevance of seeing the systemic coherence of the world. The book argues that many of the problems we experience today are routed in our practice of fragmenting that needs to be connected as a whole. It offers a method to study and design organizations and a methodology to deal with implementation problems. It is the outcome of many years of working experience with government offices as well as with all kinds of public and private enterprises. At a more detailed level this book offers an in depth discussion of variety engineering that is not available either in the primary or secondary literature.
Download or read book Design and Diagnosis for Sustainable Organizations written by Perez Rios Jose and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-01-11 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can organizations and their managers face the tremendous complexity of the current environment? How can their compliance with the requirements of sustainability be evaluated? And how can new organizations be structured to ensure their viability? This book addresses these questions in a very practical way, essentially combining systems theory with cybernetics to help managers to evaluate and shape organizations by making accessible the wealth of knowledge contained in these fields. Importantly, it also provides guidelines for its practical application.
Download or read book The Fractal Organization written by Patrick Hoverstadt and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-02-23 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world of management is in crisis - the old remedies no longer work and organizations are failing at an increasing rate. Although many talk of 'joined up thinking', few offer practical guidance on how to achieve this in organizations. The Fractal Organization sets down the practical implications of a well tested systemic approach to building organizations that are capable of surviving and flourishing in these turbulent times. "An excellent read...Many organizations fail at the mercy of their own ignorance. The author has done an excellent job in making ‘the science of effective organization’ accessible to management, providing them with a new knowledge to deal with the uncertainties that the markets place upon them." Stephen J. Brewis, Business Architect, British Telecom "...one of the most interesting, thorough and rigorous guides to management that I have ever read, ... introduces new insights in every chapter... carries a credibility which acts as a counterbalance to the sometimes difficult message which he conveys which is that a lot of mainstream management practice is at best ineffective and at worst downright destructive. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in management or systems thinking." Penny Marrington, Course Chair, Systems Group, Open University "In my opinion this book manages to present sound academic theory that is relevant and helpful to the practitioner in the business. I experienced several A-HA moments." Pauline Marsh, Strategy Director, CS&S International, BAE SYSTEMS "The insights of the Viable System Model have been open only to a select few for much too long. Hoverstadt has gone furthest in bringing these ideas to a wider audience...Management books have too often been serious but not practical, or practical but not serious. This book is both brilliantly serious and practical, and often entertaining too." Professor Peter Kawalak, Manchester Business School "Integrates mainstream management ideas with the systems ideas underpinning the VSM, and flows and reads well. As a starting point for developing understanding of the VSM in today's world this book improves greatly on all books that have gone before, I would certainly recommend it to colleagues, clients, and students." Dr. Robin Asby, Course Chair, Communication and Systems, Open University
Download or read book Systems Approaches to Managing Change A Practical Guide written by Martin Reynolds and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world of increasing complexity, instant information availability and constant flux, systems approaches provide the opportunity of a tangible anchor of purpose and iterate learning. The five approaches outlined in the book offer a range of interchangeable tools with rigorous frameworks of application tried and tested in the ‘real world’. The frameworks of each approach form a powerful toolkit to explore the dynamics of how societies emerge, how organisations create viability, how to facilitate chains of argument through causal mapping, how to embrace a multiplicity of perspectives identifying purposeful activity and how to look for the bigger picture across multiple disciplines. Systems Approaches offers an excellent first introduction for those seeking to understand what ‘systems thinking’ is all about as well as why the tools discussed herein should be applied to management and professional practice. This book provides a practical guide, and the chapters stand alone in explaining and developing each approach.
Download or read book A Complexity Approach to Sustainability written by Angela Espinosa and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2011 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major challenge of our times is to understand and manage the increasing complexity of socio-economic reality. This has immediate relevance for sustainable development. The impact of recent contributions from systems and complexity sciences in addressing this issue has not filtered down into effective practice ? notably, there remain problems caused by the legacy of competing paradigms and the application of their associated methodologies. This book argues the urgency for the application of analytical tools that embody the principles of complexity management. The authors describe a theoretical framework based on complexity science with a focus on organisational and second order cybernetics, one that presents a powerful new insight into the concept of sustainability. The book also describes actual applications of the ideas in the area of organisational, societal and environmental management, and reflects upon the impact of such an approach on current practice.
Download or read book Viable Systems Approach VSA written by Gaetano M. Golinelli and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Designing Freedom written by Stafford Beer and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 1993-11-18 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguished cyberneticist Stafford Beer states the case for a new science of systems theory and cybernetics. His essays examine such issues as The Real Threat to All We Hold Most Dear, The Discarded Tools of Modern Man, A Liberty Machine in Prototype, Science in the Service of Man, The Future That Can Be Demanded Now, The Free Man in a Cybernetic World. Designing Freedom ponders the possibilities of liberty in a cybernetic world.
Download or read book Diagnosing the System for Organizations written by Stafford Beer and published by Wiley. This book was released on 1995-06-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Stafford Beer is undoubtedly among the world?s most provocative, creative, and profound thinkers on the subject of management, and he records his thinking with a flair that is unmatched. His writing is as much art as it is science. He is the most viable system I know." —Dr Russell L Ackoff, The Institute for Interactive Management, Pennsylvania, USA. "If ... anyone can make it [Operations Research] understandably readable and positively interesting it is Stafford Beer ... everyone in management ... should be grateful to him for using clear and at times elegant English and?even elegant diagrams." —The Economist In Brain of the Firm and The Heart of Enterprise Stafford Beer worked out the scientific laws that govern any viable system. They constitute the basis for this book which is concerned solely with the application of those laws to the understanding of any particular enterprise. In the form of a Handbook or Manager's Guide, Diagnosing the System deals with the fundamental problem of management?how to cope with complexity itself. It shows you how to design (or redesign) an enterprise in conformity with the laws of viability, and will help you to diagnose faults in your organizational structure.
Download or read book The Viable System Model written by Raúl Espejo and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Viability of Organizations Vol 1 written by Wolfgang Lassl and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-05-22 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today’s complexity, speed, and need for adaptation are putting organizations under stress. Understanding how organizations function and truly come alive has become a critical competency. And yet, organizations still seem to lack a solid understanding of what constitutes meaningful, viable, and effective organizational structures. Using the Viable System Model (VSM) as a framework, this three-volume compendium volume offers readers a new and comprehensive perspective on organizations and how they function beyond the organizational chart. Moreover, it equips readers with a rigorous methodology for analyzing organizations and addressing deep-seated organizational dysfunctions, while also showing them how to redesign their structures and develop better and more tailor-made solutions. This first volume introduces readers to the VSM and its main components. Readers are taken on a journey, allowing them to rediscover all-too-familiar aspects in the life of their organization and to become aware of the critical success factors for its smooth functioning and long-term viability. In turn, volumes 2 and 3 provide an in-depth introduction to diagnosing and designing organizations with the help of the VSM. For academics, this compendium rediscovers a theoretical perspective that can help them understand macro-structural issues; at the same time, for VSM experts and researchers alike, it resolves many open aspects in the VSM framework. "This compendium is a most welcome contribution to Organizational Cybernetics. Lassl provides a detailed analytical and insightful perspective on the currently most powerful organization theory, which is a key to mastering complexity: the Viable System Model. The author also finds new, creative ways of showing the practitioner how to make the model work. If you apply it properly, you can reap huge benefits: the viability of your organization and a prosperous future."Prof. em. Dr. Markus Schwaninger, University of St. Gallen
Download or read book Human Resource Management in the Project Oriented Organization written by Martina Huemann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organizations regularly assume that the culture, values, dynamic and organization of their temporary project organizations are merely a smaller version of the original parent. Given that project organizations are made up of people and teams drawn, in most cases, from outside and inside the parent, these assumptions are nonsensical. But they do explain why the HR function finds it difficult to adapt to the project environment. Martina Huemann's research in Human Resource Management in the Project-Oriented Organization, offers insight into an approach that is designed to align HR to the needs of the project organization, in terms of management structure, reward, recruitment and performance systems. The text analyses how the modern HR organization stacks up alongside the temporary organization that is the project, to identify the HR constraints and needs of the project organisation and offer a model of project-oriented HRM. Professor Huemann had a deep interest in how and why change processes come into existence and how to design and enable them. In her book she endeavors to bridge theory and practice, strategy and operations.
Download or read book Beyond Dispute written by Stafford Beer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1994-09-20 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last forty years, Stafford Beer has published a steady stream of books and papers in which he has applied cybernetic science to organizational problems. In all of these he has explained underlying principles and developed new theories and recorded a great variety of practical applications. He has now invented and demonstrated Team Syntegrity. Syntegrity is a powerful invention in the organization of normative, directional, and strategic planning, and other creative decision processes. The underlying model is a regular icosahedron (20 sides). This has 30 edges, each of which represents a person. An internal network of interactions is created by a set of protocols. A group organized like this is an ultimate statement of participatory democracy, since each role is indistinguishable from any other. There is no hierarchy, no top, no bottom, no sideways. Beer illustrates how continued dynamic interaction between persons causes ideas and resolutions to hum around the sphere, which reverberates into a kind of group consciousness. Mathematical analysis of the structure shows how the process is determined by the even spread of synergy. The aim of the book is to provide managers and their advisors with a new planning method that captures the native genius of the organization in a non-political and non-hierarchical way. The book includes an enquiry into Beer?s concept of recursive consciousness, based on this model, that is relevant to both neurocybernetics and the social systems sciences.
Download or read book Organizations as Complex Systems written by Maurice Yolles and published by IAP. This book was released on 2006-09-01 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Managing the Complex is an ambitious title - and it would be an audacious one if we were not to begin with a frank admission: to date few to none of us have a skill set which includes managing the complex. We try various things, we write about others, and we wonder about still others. When a tool, perspective, or technique comes along which seems to evoke success, we emulate it probe it and recoil at the all too often admission that it was situation and context which afforded success its opportunity, and not some quality intrinsic to the tool perspective or technique. Indeed, if the study of complexity has done anything for managers, and for those who espouse managerial theory, it is in providing a ‘scientific foundation’ for the notion that context matters. Those who preach abstract ideas have then to reconcile themselves to the notion that situation and embodiment matters. Those who believe in strong causality and determinism are left to wrestle with the role of chance, uncertainty, and chaos. Those who prefer to argue that men move history are confronted with the role of environment and affordances, while those who argue the reverse are left to contend with charisma, irrationality of crowds, and the strange qualities we know as emotions. A series on complex systems has less ambitious goals to contend with than this. Such a series can deal with classifications, and categories, and speak of ‘noise’ as if it were not the central focus of the problem. Managing the complex is about managing ‘noise’ or perhaps we should say it is about ‘dealing with’ ‘accepting’ ‘making room for’ and ‘learning from’ ‘noise’. The articles in this volume and in volumes to come will each be considered as ‘noise’ by some and as ‘gems’ by others, but we hope that practicing managers and academics alike will find plenty of fuel to drive their personal explorations into understanding, and perhaps even managing, the complex.
Download or read book Handbook of Research on Enhancing Innovation in Higher Education Institutions written by Babi?, Verica and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2020-03-27 with total page 695 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Innovation in higher education is a process of institutional adaptation to changes in the environment that enables higher education institutions to improve their existing practice and to be innovative at different levels and in different forms. Moreover, innovativeness is also related to internal characteristics of higher education institutions. Innovation in higher education can be observed as a result of the changing contexts in which higher education institutions function. Adjacently, a comprehensive approach to considering innovativeness is needed in order to enable the examination of different elements of innovativeness in higher education, that is, to identify the key factors that (de)stimulate innovations and affect their interactions with other relevant stakeholders at the national level and beyond. The Handbook of Research on Enhancing Innovation in Higher Education Institutions is a critical scholarly book that examines innovativeness in higher education and its complications and diversity. Starting from the view that higher education is currently confronted by global forces that require new research ideas, the publication suggests that comprehensive understanding of innovativeness is imperative for higher education’s institutions in the 21st century. Analyzing the recognized trends within the publication and concluding which aspects should be taken to improve innovativeness in higher education, this reference book outlines quality and innovation in teaching, innovative university-business cooperation, institutional framework and governance of higher education institutions, knowledge management, and leadership and organizational culture. It is ideal for curriculum designers, administrators, researchers, policymakers, academicians, professionals, and students.
Download or read book Systems Concepts in Action written by Bob Williams and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-25 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Systems Concepts in Action: A Practitioner's Toolkit offers out a wide range of systems methods to help readers investigate, evaluate and intervene in complex messy situations.
Download or read book Drawdown written by Paul Hawken and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • New York Times bestseller • The 100 most substantive solutions to reverse global warming, based on meticulous research by leading scientists and policymakers around the world “At this point in time, the Drawdown book is exactly what is needed; a credible, conservative solution-by-solution narrative that we can do it. Reading it is an effective inoculation against the widespread perception of doom that humanity cannot and will not solve the climate crisis. Reported by-effects include increased determination and a sense of grounded hope.” —Per Espen Stoknes, Author, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming “There’s been no real way for ordinary people to get an understanding of what they can do and what impact it can have. There remains no single, comprehensive, reliable compendium of carbon-reduction solutions across sectors. At least until now. . . . The public is hungry for this kind of practical wisdom.” —David Roberts, Vox “This is the ideal environmental sciences textbook—only it is too interesting and inspiring to be called a textbook.” —Peter Kareiva, Director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA In the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals, and scientists have come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and practices are described here—some are well known; some you may have never heard of. They range from clean energy to educating girls in lower-income countries to land use practices that pull carbon out of the air. The solutions exist, are economically viable, and communities throughout the world are currently enacting them with skill and determination. If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path forward, not just to slow the earth’s warming but to reach drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to decline. These measures promise cascading benefits to human health, security, prosperity, and well-being—giving us every reason to see this planetary crisis as an opportunity to create a just and livable world.
