Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Beer also claimed that many organizations were entirely lacking a system 2
(1981, 175), and in the absence of the “sympathetic” damping generated by the
1-2-3 system would thus always be prone to pathological competition and “os-
cillations” between their subsidiaries. More generally, Beer worried about the
higher levels of the brain of the firm. Pieces of the organization which he felt
should lie directly on the “command” axis were often found to be misplaced.
This was true especially of parts of the organization that had grown up since
World War II, including management accounting, production control (Beer's
first job in the steel industry), and operations research (his first love in man-
agement). These had no place on prewar organization charts and thus found
themselves a position almost at random (Beer 1981, 82-83). OR groups, for
example, might be found buried in subsidiaries and thus serving the overall
organization asymmetrically—to the benefit of some subsidiary rather than
the whole firm. The moral of the VSM was that there should be an OR group
on the command axis itself, at level 3. Beer also argued that “in most firms Sys-
tem 4 is a fiasco” (153-54). Elements of system 4—the monitoring and plan-
ning organ at the base of the conscious brain—were usually to be found in any
large organization, but they tended to be dispersed across the organization
instead of grouped coherently together on the command axis. Certainly very
few clubby operations rooms were to be found in industry in this period.
We need to remember that from 1970 onward Beer made his living primar-
ily as an independent management consultant, and his writings on the VSM
were integral to that. In 1989, he produced a list of consultancies he had been
engaged in (Beer 1989a, 35):
Small industrial businesses in both production and retailing, such as an engi-
neering concern and a bakery, come to mind; large industrial organizations
such as the steel industry, textile manufacturers, ship-builders, the makers of
consumer durables, paper manufacturers are also represented. Then there are
the businesses that deal in information: publishing in general, insurance, bank-
ing. Transportation has figured: railways, ports and harbours, shipping lines.
Education, and health (in several countries), the operations of cities, belong to
studies of services. Finally comes government at all levels—from the city, to the
province, to the state and the nation itself—and the international agencies: the
VSM has been applied to several.
Obviously . . . these were not all major undertakings, nor is “success” claimed
for massive change. On the other hand, none of these applications was an aca-
demic exercise. In every case we are talking about remunerated consultancy,
and that is not a light matter. The activities did not necessarily last for very long
