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Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne's Enterprise Thinking Network welcomes friends of our late colleague and mentor, Russ Ackoff, who died on October 29th in Philadelphia, only a week after hip surgery, as reported in an In2:InThinking Network special-edition announcement.   A number of Russ's friends, including his "guys" group from Bryn Mawr, will join us to share stories from their collaborative efforts with him, and answer questions and respond to reflections from those participants who knew him from a longer distance. 

 

For those fortunate enough to visit with Russ, they would have seen and read this treasured letter from Peter Drucker, hanging on his wall after receiving it on his 80th birthday;

 

"I was then, as you may recall, one of the early ones who applied Operations Research and the new methods of Quantitative Analysis to specific BUSINESS PROBLEMS -- rather than, as they had been originally developed for, to military or scientific problems.  I had led teams applying the new methodology in two of the world's largest companies -- GE and AT&T.  We had successfully solved several major production and technical problems for these companies -- and my clients were highly satisfied.  But I was not--we had solved TECHNICAL problems but our work had no impact on the organizations and on their mindsets.  On the contrary: we had all but convinced the managements of these two big companies that QUANTITATIVE MANIPULATION was a substitute for THINKING.  And then your work and your example showed us--or at least, it showed me--that the QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS comes AFTER the THINKING -- it validates the thinking; it shows up intellectual sloppiness and uncritical reliance on precedent, on untested assumptions and on the seemingly "obvious."  But it does not substitute for hard, rigorous, intellectually challenging THINKING.  It demands it, though -- but does not replace it.  This is, of course, what YOU mean BY system.  And your work in those far-away days thus saved me -- as it saved countless others -- from either descending into mindless "model building" -- the disease that all but destroyed so many of the Business Schools in the last decades -- or from sloppiness parading as 'insight.'" 

As noted by Lew Rhodes (OD Thought Leader - October 2008), in 1972, Russ suggested that "we were entering into a new age of organizational management" that would be as fundamentally different from the machine age as the Renaissance was from the Middle Ages.  In anticipating the everything-seems-to-influence-everything-else world of today, he noted that all the apparent problems that management confronts are manifestations of these four (problems) or some combination of them;

First, how do you deal with sets of problems interactively, not independently?
 
Second, how do you design organizations which will learn and adapt more effectively, under conditions of increasingly rapid change?
 
Third, how do you manage organizations so as to better serve the purposes of their parts and, in so doing, serve the organization more effectively?
 
Fourth, how do you better manage so as to serve the purposes of the society of which the organization is a part and, in so doing, better serve the purposes of the organization?

 

                                                                                     

• In 2003, at age 84, he returned to Penn as Distinguished Affiliated Faculty in the Organizational Dynamics degree program in the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS)
• In 2005, he co-founded Adopt-a-Neighborhood for Development, Inc., an organization dedicated to encouraging and facilitating self-development programs in disadvantaged communities
• In 2007, the Ackoff Program at Tomsk University in Russia was established  
• In 2008, the Russell L. Ackoff Systems Thinking Library and Archive was created in the Organizational Dynamics program for the University of Pennsylvania's SAS. The Library holds his more than 300 scholarly publications and nearly three dozen books, his private manuscripts and personal library of more than 3000 books, as well as his awards, fellowships, medals, endowment fund, and his six honorary doctorates in science and letters.  
• Also in 2008, the Ackoff Program at New Bulgarian University in Bulgaria was established 
• In 2009, the Ackoff Center for Design Thinking at the Da Vinci Institute in South Africa was created, with able assistance from John Pourdehnad, below, also known as "the cheetah whisperer."
  

 

The following in-house "Thinking Roadmap" seminars and workshops are open to employees of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne (PWR), as well as suppliers, customers, family members, and "Members of the Community."   "Members of the community" are individuals who are involved full or part time, or in a volunteer capacity, in community related work.

Background information on PWR's Thinking Roadmap, in addition to seminar and workshop descriptions and upcoming schedules, can be found in a new addition to the In2:InThinking Network website at www.in2in.org/TR/.   Links to descriptions for each session are embedded in the titles below.

The schedule below includes the next available offerings for the listed seminars in Canoga Park, California.  Contact Bill Bellows to request additonal information.