Publisher's Synopsis
Management of organizations is an invention, which consists of making decisions to get an organization to realize its purpose. Like all inventions, it is built on principles and assumptions.For more than a century there were many theories that changed the concepts of management. And since the mid-twentieth century there were exponents of what is now called systemic thinking or Systems Theory, such as Russell Ackoff, Peter Senge, John Seddon, the MIT SDM and many others.Before the systemic thinking, in the discipline of management, methods and techniques for the decision making in the companies were developed. Several of these methods are contradictory in several aspects with systemic thinking, especially because they are inspired by an idea that sounds very logical, which is to divide the company to govern it. Being more difficult to think about systems, it has been very difficult to reverse this trend in the last eighty years. Despite the logical demonstrations and the empirical evidence, there is no massive movement in the Academy and in the companies towards the systems.In the words of Russell Ackoff, as long as the systemic nature of the organizations is not recognized, all improvement efforts are doomed to failure.This book aims to show how systemic thinking is the only one that provides the basis for an administration of organizations that gives superior results. And that Dr. Goldratt's Theory provides the principles, tools and even some applications to make this task much simpler.
