R.I.P. Russell Ackoff
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 9:49AM Russell Ackoff was one of the great management thinkers. He consistently brought a systems thinking perspective to business and organizational issues.
Russell Ackoff was one of my major inspirations for a long time. He will be missed.
Via the Financial Times ...
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Fond farewell to a brilliant thinker
By Stefan Stern
The scene is Detroit, a training room at the headquarters of one of the three great US car companies. A group of corporate vice-presidents is attending a course being given by a distinguished management thinker.
“What you are telling us is great,” the VPs say, “but you are talking to the wrong level. You should be speaking to the next tier up.” The next week, working with more senior managers, he hears the same thing. “This is great, but you are talking to the wrong level. You should be speaking with the chief executive.”
The week after that, our thinker finally gets in to see the boss. “This is great,” the CEO says, “but you should be speaking with my subordinates – I’d need their support in order to do it.”
This is a true story, as told by Russ Ackoff, the management thinker in question, who died a few days ago, aged 90.
Two key Ackoffian ideas emerge from this tale.
First, do not wait for others in the business to start changing things. Go and do it yourself.
But second, and more important: never forget that everyone in the business is interconnected, that they are all operating as part of a system, that tinkering with one part of the company is never really enough, and may even make things worse. You need to see the business as a whole, as a complete system, if you want to make lasting improvements to it.
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UPDATE: Great Ackoff-isms
“All of our problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter,” he told me. “The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter. If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better.”
“Business schools are high security prisons of the mind” he wrote. (Although an emeritus professor at the Wharton School in his home town of Philadelphia, he remained ambivalent about educational institutions in general and business schools in particular.)
“An organisation that cannot accommodate nonconformity will not be able to retain creative people”
“Organisations fail more often because of what they have not done than because of what they have done.”
“The less managers expect of their subordinates, the less they get.”
Ackoff – like Drucker – rejected the label “guru”. Followers of gurus do not think for themselves, Ackoff believed. He preferred to see himself as an educator. Consultants go into businesses and try to impose a solution, he said. Educators train the people responsible for the work to work things out for themselves.
“The only problems that have simple solutions are simple problems. The only managers that have simple problems have simple minds.
Problems that arise in organisations are almost always the product of interactions of parts, never the action of a single part. Complex problems do not have simple solutions.”
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Reader Comments (13)
Oh Jon
I met him many years ago - he told a story of being invited by the Shah to Iran. The Shah was tied up and the Empress met him. The problem? She told RA that her husband was totally dedicated to serving his country but that he could not get his own people to help. He had been asked to help the Shah connect.
He regretfully said that he could not help
Rob .. his writings always inspired me so very much.
He seemed (and no doubt was) an intellectually curious man whilst at the same time being very rigorous, and I think he was very interested in making the workplace and work more humane.
IMO (and evidently in the opinion of many others) he deserved as much fame as Drucker.
He will be missed .. a great mind and no doubt a great heart.
Rob - I heard him tell that story, and many others, as well. As I remember it he told it as a precautionary tale about how, no matter how powerful you are, all your plans can be sabotaged by the willful neglect or your subordinates.
I was fortunate enough to spend a couple of days with Russ at the beginning of this year and in late January of last year as well. He was a frequent visitor to my place of work here in Southern California, until his hip was too bothersome for him to want to deal with airport security any longer. I wrote a small tribute to him myself at my blog, which should be part of this comment. He was an incredible person with an amazing intellect.
I agree he deserved as much fame as Drucker. I believe Peter thought the same. One of Russ's favorite things was a letter from him for what I don't quite remember. I think it was a review of one of Russ's books. Johnnie Pourdehnad would know.
Thanks so much for this tribute. Russ will be sorely missed.
Rick
Rick - Here is the letter Peter Drucker wrote to Russ. Johnnie Pourdehnad sent it to me. It does not have a date on it, but I seem to recall hearing Peter wrote it a couple of years before he died.
- Steve
Subject: Peter Drucker's message to Ackoff
Russ truly cherished this message. It is still hanging on his home office wall
“I was then, as you may recall, one of the early ones who applied Operations Research and the new methods of Quantitative Analysis to specific BUSINESS PROBLEMS -- rather than, as they had been originally developed for, to military or scientific problems. I had led teams applying the new methodology in two of the world’s largest companies -- GE and AT&T. We had successfully solved several major production and technical problems for these companies -- and my clients were highly satisfied. But I was not--we had solved TECHNICAL problems but our work had no impact on the organizations and on their mindsets. On the contrary: we had all but convinced the managements of these two big companies that QUANTITATIVE MANIPULATION was a substitute for THINKING. And then your work and your example showed us--or at least, it showed me--that the QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS comes AFTER the THINKING -- it validates the thinking; it shows up intellectual sloppiness and uncritical reliance on precedent, on untested assumptions and on the seemingly “obvious.” But it does not substitute for hard, rigorous, intellectually challenging THINKING. It demands it, though -- but does not replace it. This is, of course, what YOU mean BY system. And your work in those far-away days thus saved me -- as it saved countless others -- from either descending into mindless “model building” -- the disease that all but destroyed so many of the Business Schools in the last decades -- or from sloppiness parading as ‘insight.’”
Peter Drucker
It is a message from one thinker to another that bears cherishing.
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