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either, since speedy diagnosis is a major contribution of the whole approach.
On the other hand, some of them have lasted for years. Undoubtedly the major
use of this work to date was in Chile from 1971-1973.
Chile is next. Here I can just emphasize what is obvious from this list: Beer
operated not only at the level of commercial companies; many other kinds of
social organizations were likewise open to his interventions. We should also
remember what was noted earlier—that by the 1980s the VSM had gained
a significant following among management consultants and their academic
counterparts, leading to the publication of at least one multiauthor topic on
the VSM (Espejo and Harnden 1989). The interested reader can look there
for case studies written up by Beer and his followers, including Beer's sixty-
page account of his association over nine years with a mutual life assurance
company (Beer 1989a), as well as for various methodological and substantive
reflections on and extensions of the VSM. The VSM was never one of those
great fads that seem to have periodically overtaken the world of management
since the Second World War. Given its subtlety and complexity, to which I
have done scant justice here, this does not seem surprising. But it has been at
the heart of a significant movement.
Chile: Project Cybersyn
In Chile in the autumn of 1970 Salvador Allende became the world's first
democratically elected socialist president. The new government started
nationalizing the banks and major companies operating within Chile, oper-
ating through an existing organization known as CORFO (Corporacíon de
Fomento de la Produccíon). On 13 July 1971, the technical general manager
of CORFO, one Fernando Flores, wrote to Beer (Beer 1981, 247): “This letter
spoke of 'the complete reorganization of the public sector of the economy,' for
which it appeared its author [Flores] would be primarily responsible. He had
read my topics, and had even worked with a SIGMA team ten years before.
He went on to say that he was now 'in a position from which it is possible
to implement, on a national scale—at which cybernetic thinking becomes a
necessity—scientific views on management and organization.' He hoped that
I would be interested. I was.” Beer's commitment to the project became “total”
(245), and he subsequently published a long account of the project's evolu-
tion and termination, in five chapters added to the second edition of
Brain of
the Firm
(Beer 1981, 241-399). Beer's chapters are, as usual, very dense, and
I can only attempt an overview of his account as a way of sketching in the
