This is not an easy book. The reader is encountering an extraordinarily brilliant mind, expositing a complex idea without dumbing it down at all. But the idea is astonishing, and the time spent exploring it is repaid in spades.
Stafford Beer was interested in viable systems; systems that are able to continue to exist over time. He studied biology, ecosystems, electronics, information theory, computers, corporate governance, and governments, and sought to create a pattern language for describing how every kind of system continues to sustain itself. And then he set work to analyze social systems, like governments and corporations, to improve the model so that it was an effective way to gain insight in to how social systems behave and how to make them more effective.
His model works well in describing an individual human being as a biological organism, but when applied to a corporation, provides surprising insights about the blind spots in an organization, and how these blind spots account for lost opportunities and much inefficiency. The model provides a number of ways in which there must be balance: balance between different goods and services a company provides, balance between workers and management, balance between operations and research/development, and balance between the functioning of the whole system and how it conforms to its mission statement. Along the way he tries to build up the autonomy of the people working at each level, so that the only time management needs to intervene is when something goes wrong, leaving them to work on their own issues rather than the issues of their subordinates. Beer points out that an org chart is set up mostly to create a chain of whom to blame, rather than as a realistic description of what is actually happening inside an organization.
Beer uses mathematics, biology, computer science, and electronics in elucidating his model. He coins a number of terms that he uses in his exposition. His interdisciplinary approach can be daunting. But he shows that his ideas work in practical situations. He might be a dreamer, but he is a dreamer with both feet planted firmly on the ground.
"Brain of the Firm" was a favorite of Brian Eno's, who worked with Beer as a colleague, and also of David Bowie's, and both incorporated Beer's ideas into their music. I have found for me that Beer's ideas inform a lot of things I do, both in business, and in my creative life.
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