To many the term 'Management Science' is an oxymoron. There seems to be no middle ground between the now deeply unfashionable 'tool driven' mathematical obsessions of Operations Research and the management fads and anecdotally rich, but content poor, business 'success stories' which shout at us from every airport bookstall.
Whilst we believe that real life is too rich and complex to be able to be reduced to a set of equations, we are committed to developing rational scientific based approaches to the practical challenges of management.
We want to support and guide managers - to make better use of our unique human qualities rather than trying to replace them. Much of the 'science' we need has been around for decades but has either not been used properly of where it has, it has not been properly appreciated or fully exploited.
We would like to share some of the ideas and the material inspired our work and would invite you to share yours. Through this page you will be able to access material and explore links which will hopefully enrich your understanding of what is 'out there'.
If you have material which you think would complement or enrich ours please contact us.
The original inspiration for what we do came from our efforts to replace traditional, backward, budgeting practices. We soon came to recognise that one of these reasons why this style of management was still practiced (despite its obvious flaws and widespread loathing amongst managers) was that the kind of tools that people needed to manage without budgets had not been invented.
Follow this link to find more about the organisation that inspired this work - the Beyond Budgeting Round Table.
Much of our work and thinking is based upon the notion that any form of measurement is probabilistic; it can only be approximate. In physics - at a quantum level - this is encpasualted in Heisenburgs Principle of Unvertainty. In normal every day life the reason why we can never be certain is because of the existence of variation - the consequence of a multitude of unknowable factors introducing uncertainty into every kind of process. The consequences of variation for practical management tasks was first understood by the fathers of the Quality Movement and now underpins modern manaufacturing practice - as manifest, for example, in the famous Toyota Manufacturing System.
It is quite staggering that the implications of variation for management as a whole have not been more widely understood or explored.
A good place to start is this article written by a leading member of the second generation of western quality gurus; Myron Tribus.
A surprising number of managers have never heard of W Edwards Deming despite the fact that he was perhaps the most important figure in the Quality Movement - by far an away the most impactful intellectual force in business history and the inspiration for the Toyota Management System, TQM, Six Sigma and so on. As such Deming, along with Peter Drucker, should be regarded as the most influential thinker in the history of management.
We believe a large part of the success and longevity of his ideas is because his thinking was based on scientific insight and methodology - applied in a pragmatic way. In particular he emphasised the significance of variation and the need for managers to understand its impact on all measurement processes before any intelligent action can be taken.
Our company is based on the same basic philosophy, and our tools and methodology extensively adopts and adapts the techniques he and others invented.
Click here to link to Demings Wikepedia entry - probably the best place to begin to discover out about the extraordinary legancy of this man, and to get a deeper understanding of some of the ideas which underpin our own work.
Cybernetics (the science of control and communication in man and machine) is currently unfashionable, largely because it has always been profoundly misunderstood and misrepresented. Arguably it represents the only serious attempt to apply scientific, systems based, thinking to the problem of 'organisation'; whether it be physical, biological or social. Contrary to it's detractors claims, cybernetic insights tend to support a liberal, humanistic perpective on social organisation, not a mechanistic, control orientated one.
Our belief is the cybernetics is waiting to be rediscovered by contemporary systems scientists, and that when it is redicovered tools and methodologies such as those we develop will be needed to help translate the ideas into reality.
The pinnacle of cybernetic thinking in the social arena is the work of Stafford Beer, and in particular his Viable System Model. Beer was a polymath in the old style and his work is sometimes difficult and dense (assuming as he does that you are deeply familiar with classical Greek and the Second Law of Thermosdynamics) but, once mastered, incredibly rewarding.
The link is to the Wikepedia entry for the Viable Systems Model, but Beer's own entry is worth a read. Ultimately though his books are the best place to go; try 'Diagnosing the Systems' and 'Designing Freedom' as a starting point.
Our aim to provide business people with concepts, tools and methodologies that:
* help eliminate irrelevant 'noise' and so create 'intelligence'
* use scientific approaches to help develop simple tools and methodologies so that we can apply our intellect and creativity productively in other words...Applied Intelligence.
