Recent passage from Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne's Enterprise Thinking Network newsletter concerning  Russell Ackoff.

Russell Ackoff

Russ died on October 29th in Philadelphia, only a week after hip surgery. 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.

Peter Drucker

"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.'"