Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
in the road. The referent of their cybernetics was always reciprocally adapting
systems.
I should add that Beer and Pask were extraordinary individuals. Beer dis-
played fabulous energy and creativity. Reading a diary that he kept during
his first visit to the United States, from 23 April to 12 June 1960, leaves one
limp (Beer 1994 [1960]); his career in management was accompanied by awe-
some literary productivity (in terms of quality as well as quantity), mainly on
cybernetic management and politics, though he was also a published poet
(Beer 1977); he painted pictures, and some of his works were displayed in
Liverpool Cathedral and elsewhere (Beer 1993b); he also taught tantric yoga,
loved women, slept only briefly, and drank continually (white wine mixed
with water in his later years).
After an outline biography, I turn to Beer's work in management and poli-
tics, focusing in turn on his early work on biological computers, his viable
system model of organizations, and the team syntegrity approach to decision
making. Then we can examine the spiritual aspects of Beer's cybernetics and
the cybernetic aspects of his spirituality. The chapter ends with an examina-
tion of the relation between Beer's cybernetics and Brian Eno's music.
Stafford Beer was born in Croydon, near London, on 25 September 1926,
nearly five years the elder of two brothers (his younger brother Ian went on to
be headmaster of Harrow Public School and on his retirement wrote a topic
called
But, Headmaster!
[2001]).
1
Like Ashby, Walter, and Pask, Stafford had
a first name that he never used—Anthony—though he buried it more deeply
than the others. His brother's third name was also Stafford, and when Ian
was sixteen, Stafford “asked me to sign a document to promise that I would
never use Stafford as part of my name. I could use it as I. D. S. Beer, or, indeed,
using the four names together but he wanted the 'copyright' of Stafford Beer
and so it was forever more.”
2
Early in World War II, their mother, Doris, took
Stafford and Ian to Wales to escape the German bombing, and at school there
Stafford met Cynthia Hannaway, whom he married after the war. In 1942 the
family returned to England, and Stafford completed his education at Whitgift
School, where “he was a difficult pupil as he was found to be unsuitable for
certain Sixth Form courses or he demanded to leave them for another. He
could not stand the specialization and talked all the time of holistic teaching
and so on. He wanted to study philosophy but that was not taught at school.
He was precocious to a degree. A letter written by him was published in the
