Russell L. Ackoff

Books

• The Democratic Corporation: A Radical Prescription for Recreating Corporate America and Rediscovering Success
  

• Re-Creating the Corporation:
  

• Creating the Corporate Future:
  Presents a participative systems approach to interactive planning. Describes how to formulate the system of problems and opportunities that face a corporation.

• Ackoff's Best: Timeless Observations on the Life of Business
  From managing teams, maximizing the effectiveness of information systems, and problem solving, to creativity, crime, and the role of the corporation in a democratic society, these writings are a cornucopia of insights, observations, and powerful lessons that will help you improve the effectiveness of your organization.

• The Art of Problem Solving Accompanied by Ackoff's Fables:
  Shows how to develop an understanding of the art of creative thinking and design creative solutions. Based on real problems faced by real managers.

• Beating the System: Using Creativity to Outsmart Bureaucracies
  "Coauthors Russell Ackoff and Sheldon Rovin have spent their lives studying how organizational systems work, and here they share both perversely entertaining anecdotes about the abuse of individuals by a variety of bureaucracies, and descriptions of

• Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow's Crisis...Today
  Envision your ideal solution: then, work backwards to where you are. Start-to-finish techniques and examples drawn from hundreds of companies, non-profits, and government organizations will show you how to use idealized design.

• Systems Thinking for Curious Managers: with 40 New Management f-Laws
  Finished just before Professor Ackoff's death late in 2009, Systems Thinking for Curious Managers opens the door to a joined up way of thinking about things that has profoundly influenced thinkers and doers in the fields of business, politics, economics, biology, psychology. Although Systems Thinking was 'invented' early in the 20th century, even Peter Senge's best-selling "The Fifth Discipline" (Systems Thinking is the fifth discipline) failed to popularize the term. But now, in business and academia, in the public sector and in the search for solutions to the environmental problems we face, Systems Thinking is being talked about everywhere. This timely book presents 40 more of Russ Ackoff's famously witty and incisive f-Laws (or flaws) of business - following on from his 2007 collection "Management f-Laws". All those in this collection are new and previously unpublished. Andrew Carey's extended introduction ties these f-Laws into the rest of Ackoff's work and gives the reader new to Systems Thinking a practical guide to the implications of Systems Thinking for organisations and managers.

• Management f-Laws: How Organizations Really Work
  A full collection of more than 80 of Russell Ackoff's management f-laws: the uncomfortable truths about how organizations really work, what's wrong with the way we design and manage businesses, what makes managers tick... and how we can make things work better.

Articles

• Design and Planning in Organizations   view details
  A great introduction to the Spring 1996 Center for Quality of Management Journal on this topic.

• Management Gurus and Educators   view details
  

• An Idealized Design of the U.S. Healthcare System   view details
  "A consortium consisting of representative stakeholders in the National Healthcare (so-called) System has produced a "true" redesign of that system."

• A Day with Dr. Russel L. Ackoff   view details
  Highly Recommended - Video of presentation to the Chicago-Kent College of Law.
  "Among the topics Dr. Ackoff discussed during the workshop were:
  - The history and application of systems thinking
  - How do social systems allow us to understand and overcome long term problems in today's environment?
  - How can you effect change within the system in which you play a role?"

• A Brief Guide to Interactive Planning and Idealized Design   view details
  "Interactive planning is directed at creating the future. It is based on the belief that an organization's future depends at least as much on what it does between now and then, as on what is done to it. Therefore, this type of planning consists of the design of a desirable present and the selection or invention of ways of approximating it as closely as possible. It creates its future by continuously closing the gap between where it is at any moment of time and where it would most like to be."

• The Future of Operational Research is Past   view details
  "I hold academic OR and the relevant professional societies primarily responsible for this decline-and since I had a hand in initiating both, I share this responsibility. By the mid 1960's most OR courses in American universities were given by academics w

• Resurrecting the Future of Operational Research   view details
  "In a previous paper I tried to show that OR is in a mess. There is no one solution to a mess. What is needed are designs and inventions that will enable Operational Researchers to formulate their ideals explicitly, pursue them effectively and do so in a

• A Systemic View of Transformational Leadership   view details
  "Therefore, a transformational leader is one who can produce, or encourage and facilitate the production of, a mobilizing vision of a transformed system. Equally important, the leader must be able to inspire and organize or have organized an effective pur

• Transforming The Systems Movement   view details
  "Systems thinking produces radical and potentially revolutionary visions of public institutions. Nothing short of such visions can transform the state of world affairs. I believe we have an obligation to the global society of which we are a part to make

• From Mechanistic to Social Systemic Thinking   view details
  An excellent article based on his presentation to the Systems Thinking in Action Conference.

• Interview of Russell Ackoff   view details
  Printed interview (the site also offers a audio version of the interview). "So analysis,we discovered, yields information about the structure of something, and how it works, that?s knowledge, know how. Explanations lie outside, that?s synthetic thinking

• Doing the Wrong Thing Right (podcast)   view details
  As usually Ackoff provides great ideas, in an interesting and entertaining manner. This talk focuses on learning (and education and teaching) and doing the right things (effectiveness).

• A Major Mistake That Managers Make   view details
  "Errors of omission, lost opportunities, are generally more critical than errors of commission. Organizations fail or decline more frequently because of what they did not do than because of what they did."

• Systems Practice - Managing Complexity   view details
  "A system is a whole whose characteristics derive out of the interactions of its parts. Not the actions of its parts taken separately, it?s the way the parts interact."

• Thinking About the Future   view details
  "My preoccupation is with where we would ideally like to be right now. Knowing this, we can act now so as constantly to reduce the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Then, to a large extent, the future is created by what we do now."

• An Alternative School Voucher System   view details
  "This system would move much of the control of public and private education into the hands of the parents of students. They cannot possibly do worse than the so-called experts have done, and there is a good chance that they will do much better."

• Idealized Design: Bells Labs Creating the Telephone System of the Future   view details
  Excerpt from Idealized Design, discussing how Bell Labs designed and creted the phone system of the future in the 1950s.

• On Learning and Systems That Facilitate It   view details
  "Put another way, it is usually better to do the right thing wrong than it is to do the wrong thing right. When one does the wrong thing right, one's error is reinforced, and this encourages further improvement in the pursuit of the wrong end."

• A Little Book of F-laws: 13 common sins of management   view details
  Laws include: The more time managers spend trying to get rid of what they don.t want, the less likely they are to get what they do want; Managers who don.t know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure. Great, highly recommended.

• Towards A System of Systems Concepts   view details
  "System and the most important types of system are defined so that differences and similarities are made explicit. Particular attention is given to that type of system of most interest to management scientists: organizations. The relationship between a sy

• Why Few Organizations Adopt Systems Thinking   view details
  "To understand why organizations do not use mistakes as opportunities for learning, other than a disposition inherited from educational institutions, we must recognize that there are two types of mistake: errors of commission and errors of omission."

• Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track   view details
  "For too long, we have educated people for a world that no longer exists, extinguishing their creativity and instilling values antithetical to those of a free, 21st century democracy. The principal objective of education as currently provided is to ensure

• Interview of and by Dr. Ackoff and Dr. Deming   view details
  Great stuff. The transcript spells Dr. Ackoff's name wrong (Akoff). They discuss the important of viewing organizations as systems and a fair amount of time on the problems with business school education in the USA. And they touch on a huge number of management topics. Dr. Deming "When one understands who depends on me, then I may take joy in my work." Dr. Ackoff "If there isn't join in work, you won't get productivity, and you won't get quality."

Author Quotes

Management quotes by Russell L. Ackoff

Web sites

• Russell L. Ackoff

Alternative names:

Russ Ackoff, Russell Ackoff, Dr. Russell Ackoff