Anthony Stafford Beer

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Anthony Stafford Beer (September 25, 1926 - August 23, 2002) was a British theorist, academic, and consultant, best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics.

Beer was born in London. He started a degree in philosophy at University College London, but left in 1944 to join the army. He saw service in India and stayed there until 1947. In 1949 he was demobilized, having reached the rank of captain.

Beer had become aware of operational research while in the army and he was quick to identify the advantages it could bring to business. He joined United Steel and persuaded the management to found an operational research group, the Department of Operations Research and Cybernetics, which he headed. In 1959 he published his first book, Cybernetics and Management, building on the ideas of Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch and especially William Ross Ashby for a systems approach to the management of organisations.

In 1961 he left United Steel to start an operational research consultancy in partnership with Roger Eddison called SIGMA (Science in General Management). Beer left SIGMA in 1966 to work for a SIGMA client, the International Publishing Corporation (IPC). He was appointed development director at IPC and pushed for the adoption of new computer technologies. Also in 1966 he wrote Decision and Control. Beer left IPC in 1970 to work as an independent consultant, focusing on his growing interest in social systems.

His biggest independent project was never completed. In 1970 Beer was approached by Salvador Allende's elected socialist government of Chile to develop a national real-time computerised system Cybersyn to run the entire Chilean economy. When General Augusto Pinochet seized power in a violent military coup in 1973, the Cybersyn project was abandoned. Beer continued to work in the Americas, consulting for the governments of Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela. He also wrote a series of four books, based on his own Viable System Model for organisation modeling: Platform for Change, Designing Freedom, Heart of Enterprise and The Brain Of The Firm.

In the mid 1970s Beer renounced material possessions and moved to mid-Wales where he lived in an almost austere style, developing strong interests in poetry and art. In the 1980s he established a second home on the west side of downtown Toronto and lived part of the year in both residences. Beer kept active with work in his field and in 1994 he published Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity. Team Syntegrity is a formal model, built on the polyhedra idea of systems for non-hierarchical problem solving.

Beer was a visiting professor at almost thirty universities and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leeds, the University of Sunderland and the University of Valladolid. He was president of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics and received awards from the Royal Swedish Academy for Engineering Sciences, the United Kingdom Systems Society, the Cybernetics Society, the American Society for Cybernetics, and the Operations Research Society of America. An audio file of his talk "Forty Years of Cybernetics" to the Cybernetics Society is available from their website.

He was married twice, in 1947 to Cynthia Hannaway and in 1968 to Sallie Steadman. His partner for the last twenty years of his life was Dr Allenna Leonard, a fellow cybernetician. Beer had five sons and three daughters.