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Russell Ackoff

Geburtstag: 12. Februar 1919
Todesdatum: 29. Oktober 2009

Russell Lincoln Ackoff war ein amerikanischer Organisationstheoretiker.

Russel Ackoff war Pionier in den Gebieten Operations Research und Systemdenken.

Zitate Russell Ackoff

„Out of this basic language, we build up the other languages of the sciences, beginning with the language of physics, and proceeding to biology, psychology, and the social sciences.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Charles West Churchman, Russell Lincoln Ackoff (1950) Methods of inquiry: an introduction to philosophy and scientific method. p. 185; Partly cited in: Britton, G. A., & McCallion, H. (1994). An overview of the Singer/Churchman/Ackoff school of thought. Systems Practice, Vol 7 (5), 487-521.
1950s
Kontext: … All other languages can be translated into the thing-language, but the thing-language cannot be translated into any other language. Its terms can only be reduced to what are called "ostensive" definitions. These consist merely of pointing or otherwise evoking a direct experience. Hence, the thing-language is absolutely basic. Out of this basic language, we build up the other languages of the sciences, beginning with the language of physics, and proceeding to biology, psychology, and the social sciences.

„The less sure managers are of their opinions, the more vigorously they defend them.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 2000s, A little book of f-laws: 13 common sins of management, 2006, p. 8, bold text cited in: Gregory H. Watson (2010).
Kontext: The less sure managers are of their opinions, the more vigorously they defend them. Managers do not waste their time defending beliefs they hold strongly – they just assert them. Nor do they bother to refute what they strongly believe is false.

„The less important an issue is, the more time managers spend discussing it.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 2000s, A little book of f-laws: 13 common sins of management, 2006, p. 16, bold text cited in: Gerald Haigh (2008) Inspirational, and Cautionary Tales for Would-be School Leaders. p. 142.
Kontext: The less important an issue is, the more time managers spend discussing it. More time is spent on small talk than is spent on large talk. Most talk is about what matters least. What matters least is what most of us know most about.

„Managers who don't know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

For example, those who want a high quality of work life but don't know how to measure it, often settle for wanting a high standard of living because they can measure it.
Quelle: 2000s, A little book of f-laws: 13 common sins of management, 2006, p. 4, bold text cited in: Colin J. Neill, Phillip A. Laplante, Joanna F. DeFranco (2011) Antipatterns: Managing Software Organizations and People.

„The only managers that have simple problems have simple minds.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Ackoff (2007) as cited in: Stefan Stern (2009) "Fond farewell to a brilliant thinker". in: Financial Times, November 9, 2009.
2000s
Kontext: 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.

„A good deal of the corporate planning I have observed is like a ritual rain dance; it has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does. Moreover, it seems to me that much of the advice and instruction related to corporate planning is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 1980s, Creating the Corporate Future, 1981, p. ix in the Preface: "Creating the Corporate Future: Plan or be Planned For," Wiley, April 27, 1981

„Most managers have some conception of at least some of the types of decisions they must make. Their conceptions, however, are likely to be deficient in a very critical way, a way that follows from an important principle of scientific economy: The less we understand a phenomenon, the more variables we require to explain it.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 1960s, Management misinformation systems, 1967, p. 149.

„Planning is the design of a desired future and of effective ways of bringing it about. It is an instrument that is used by the wise, but not by the wise alone. When conducted by lesser men it often becomes an irrelevant ritual that produces short-run peace of mind, but not the future that is longed for.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 1960s, A concept of corporate planning, 1969, p. 1 as cited in: George David Hughes (1997) Marketing management: a planning approach. p. 14 and many other works.

„Problem solving has traditionally been taken to be an essential function of management. Through systems thinking, however, we have come to doubt the existence of problems and solutions to them.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 1970s, Redesigning the future, 1974, p. 20.

„Every culture has a shared pattern of thinking. It is the cement that holds a culture together, gives it unity. A culture's characteristic way of thinking is imbedded in its concept of the nature of reality, its world view.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 1990s, Re-Creating the Corporation (1999), p. 4.

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„An organization's mission statement (1) should contain its reasons for existence and its most general aspirations, its ideals. (2) It should identify in very general terms the way(s) by which the organization will pursue its ideals, that is, the business it wants to be in. (3) It should formulate the ways by which it will attempt to serve each of its stakeholder groups. (4) It should meet the preceding requirements in a way that is exciting and challenging to all its stakeholders. Finally, (5) it should establish the uniqueness of the organization.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 1990s, Re-Creating the Corporation (1999), p. 83.

„Man seeks objectives that enable him to convert the attainment of every goal into a means for the attainment of a new and more desirable goal. The ultimate objective in such a sequence cannot be obtainable; otherwise its attainment would put an end to the process. An end that satisfies these conditions is an ideal…
Thus the formulation and pursuit of ideals is a means by which to put meaning and significance into his life and into the history of which he is part.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 1970s, On purposeful systems., 1972, p. 237, as cited in: William E. Smith (2008) The Creative Power. p. 58.

„Over time, every way of thinking generates important problems that it cannot solve.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 1990s, Re-Creating the Corporation (1999), p. 3. Opening sentence.

„Because we cannot yet (1) characterize all the possible experimental designs along quantitative scales and (2) generate cost-of-error functions, comparisons must be made in specific contexts rather than by use of analytic optimizing.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 1960s, Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions, 1962, p. 340 as cited in: Philosophica gandensia, Vol.6-7 (1968). p. 141.

„A mission statement should define the business that the organization wants to be in, not necessarily what it is in.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 1990s, Re-Creating the Corporation (1999), p. 83.

„A system is more than the sum of its parts; it is an indivisible whole.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

It loses its essential properties when it is taken apart. The elements of a system may themselves be systems, and every system may be part of a larger system.
Ackoff (1973) "Science in the Systems Age: beyond IE, OR and MS." in: Operations Research Vol 21, pp. 664.
1970s

„Analysis of a system reveals its structure and how it works. It provides the knowledge required to make it work efficiently and to repair it when it stops working. Its product is know-how, knowledge, not understanding. To enable a system to perform effectively we must understand it—we must be able to explain its behavior—and this requires being aware of its functions in the larger systems of which it is a part.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Quelle: 1990s, Re-Creating the Corporation (1999), p. 12.

„Systems science and technology constitute one aspect of systems thinking, but the humanities and arts make up the other. The fact that design plays such a large part in the systemic treatment of problems makes it apparent that art has a major role in it as well. Ethics and aesthetics are integral aspects of evaluating systems… the systems approach involves the pursuit of truth (science) and its effective use (technology), plenty (economics), the good (ethics and morality), and beauty and fun (aesthetics). To compare systems methodology with that of any of the so-called ‘hard’ disciplines—for example, physics—is to misunderstand the nature of systems. The worry is not that the systems approach is not scientific in the sense which physics or chemistry or biology is, but that some try to make it scientific in that sense. To the extent they succeed, they destroy it.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Ackoff (1999). "Disciplines, the two cultures and the scianities". Systems Research and Behavioral Science. 16 (6), p. 537. Cited in: Sherryl Stalinski (2005) A Systems View of Social Systems, Culture and Communities. Saybrook Graduate School. p. 5.
1990s

„In the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of the "system" as a key concept in scientific research. Systems, of course, have been studied for centuries, but something new has been added… The tendency to study systems as an entity rather than as a conglomeration of parts is consistent with the tendency in contemporary science no longer to isolate phenomena in narrowly confined contexts, but rather to open interactions for examination and to examine larger and larger slices of nature. Under the banner of systems research (and its many synonyms) we have also witnessed a convergence of many more specialized contemporary scientific developments… These research pursuits and many others are being interwoven into a cooperative research effort involving an ever-widening spectrum of scientific and engineering disciplines. We are participating in what is probably the most comprehensive effort to attain a synthesis of scientific knowledge yet made.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Ackoff (1959), "Games, Decisions and Organizations," General Systems, 4 (1959), p. 145-150; cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 9.
1950s

„Doing philosophy was an opportunity to learn something new. I expected this to be an adjunct to my practice of architecture. But it turned out the other way. It turned out that the philosophy of science gave me the opportunity to design social systems, and I was more interested in people-oriented systems than in buildings. They were both design, but different kinds of design. I like creating things.“

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— Russell L. Ackoff

Ackoff cited in: Carole Novak (2000) " Interview with Russell L. Ackoff http://www.ait.net/technos/tq_09/3ackoff.php". in: Technos Quartely. Fall 2000 Vol. 9 No. 3. This quote is the answer to the question, why Ackoff switched from architecture to philosophy in his graduate studies.
2000s