"Stafford Beer is undoubtedly among the world s most provocative, creative, and profound thinkers on the subject of management, andhe records his thinking with a flair that is unmatched. His writingis as much art as it is science. He is the most viable system Iknow." Dr Russell L Ackoff, The Institute for InteractiveManagement, Pennsylvania, USA. "If anyone can make it OperationsResearch] understandably readable and positively interesting it isStafford Beer everyone in management should be grateful to him forusing clear and at times elegant English and even elegantdiagrams." The Economist

Based on the Massey Lectures, this book examines the reasons whythe institutions of our society may well be failing, and opens adiscussion as to what could be done. Drawing on the science ofeffective organization, which is his definition of cybernetics, Stafford Beer explains key cybernetic principles in words andpictures that all can understand. He concludes that our societycommits more and more resources to plastering over the cracks inthe system which simply reappear while freedom itself isincreasingly eroded. The institutions must be redesigned, andreturned to the people, to whom the scientific tools for doing thisought to belong.