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ships at many other universities in Britain, Canada, Sweden (Stockholm), and
the United States dating from 1970 onward. He was awarded major prizes for
his work in operations research and cybernetics by the Operations Research
Society of America, the American Society for Cybernetics, the Austrian So-
ciety for Cybernetics, and the World Organization of Systems and Cybernet-
ics. A festschrift in Beer's honor was published in 2004 (Espejo 2004), and
two volumes of his key papers have also appeared (Beer 1994a; Whittaker
2009).
Figure 6.1 is a photograph of Beer in the early 1960s when he was direc-
tor of SIGMA—the smartly trimmed hair and beard, the three-piece suit, the
cigar: the very model of a successful English businessman. In the early 1970s,
however, Beer changed both his lifestyle and appearance. Partly, no doubt,
this was in disgust at events in Chile with which he had been deeply involved,
culminating in the Pinochet coup in 1973 (as discussed below). But also, as
he told me, approaching his fiftieth birthday, he was moved to take stock of
his life—“I had had two wives, I had eight children, a big house and a Rolls-
Royce”—and the upshot of this stock taking was that in 1974 Beer renounced
material possessions and went to live in a small stone cottage in a remote
part of Wales.
4
He retained the cottage for the rest of his life, but after the
mideighties he divided his time between there and a small house he shared
with Allenna Leonard in Toronto. This break in Beer's life was registered by a
change in his appearance (fig. 6.2) and also in his writing style. Until this
change, Beer's writing took a fairly conventional form. His irst topic in its
wake was
Platform for Change: A Message from Stafford Beer
, printed on paper of
four different colors, signaling different modes of argument and presentation.
The introduction, printed on yellow paper, begins thus (Beer 1975, 1):
HELLO
I would like to talk to you
if you have the time
in a new sort of way
about a new sort of world.
It ends (6):
I am fed up with hiding myself
an actual human being
behind the conventional anonymity
of scholarly authorship.
