Stafford Beer

Anthony Stafford Beer, born Fulham 25 September 1926 (TBYT 2009: 352); died 2002 (TBYT 2009: 16). Cybernetician whose viable-system-model overview restates as he stated it, every claim with a locator. Cybernetic Futures is a centenary reappraisal of his work.

Role in the corpus

pure-vsm-appendix A: chronology from “Books by Stafford Beer” and Whittaker’s “Threads From a Life” (TBYT 2009: 352–361). Abbreviations mark books used in the text:

• DC — Decision and Control (1966) decision-and-control; Lanchester Prize (TBYT 2009: 356)
• MS — Management Science (1967) management-science-1967
• DF — Designing Freedom (1974); Massey Lectures, November 1973 (TBYT 2009: 357)
• PFC — Platform for Change (1975) platform-for-change
• HOE — The Heart of Enterprise (1979) the-heart-of-enterprise
• BOTF — Brain of the Firm, 2nd ed. 1981 (1st 1972) brain-of-the-firm
• DTS — Diagnosing the System for Organizations (1985) diagnosing-the-system-for-organizations
• BD — Beyond Dispute (1994) beyond-dispute; team-syntegrity launched January 1990 (TBYT 2009: 359)
• TBYT — Think Before You Think (2009), ed. Whittaker think-before-you-think

Cybernetics and Management (1959) is “not yet used”.

Open points

• Draft 0.8 is not project canon until checked against Beer’s texts (project brief).
• Death year is the TBYT editor’s introduction (TBYT 2009: 16), not a Beer locator.
• Transit, Pebbles to Computers, One Person Metagame listed, not corpus keys.

Related

viable-system-model · cybersyn · team-syntegrity · overview · overview