Russell Ackoff (RIP)

The great management thinker and philosopher Russell ackoff died in October, a great loss to alternatives in management thinking. As a systems thinker, he regarded the detail of current management planning as a crisis, and wrote extensively about the flaws in this. Highlighting the risk aversion that is trained into most managers, he regularly proposed a new direction of management measurement - checking up on what people failed tro do as well as what people failed in doing. As he put it: "Managers cannot learn from doing things right, only from doing them wrong".

See more Ackoff at the Ackoff collaboratory (blog), on Mission statements, on systems thinking and an obituary.