“A system must be managed. It will not manage itself. Left to themselves in the Western world, components become selfish, competitive, independent profit centres, and thus destroy the system.... The secret is cooperation between components toward the aim of the organization. We can not afford the destructive effect of competition.”

— W. Edwards Deming

The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993)

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W. Edwards Deming 33

American professor, author, and consultant 1900–1993

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“Management’s job. It is management’s job to direct the efforts of all components toward the aim of the system. The first step is clarification: everyone in the organization must understand the aim of the system, and how to direct his efforts toward it. Everyone must understand the damage and loss to the whole organization from a team that seeks to become a selfish, independent, profit centre.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993)

“The management of a system has to deal with the generation of the plans for the system, i. e., consideration of all of the things we have discussed, the overall goals, the environment, the utilization of resources and the components. The management sets the component goals, allocates the resources, and controls the system performance.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. 44

“All component parts of any system of management must be consistent with each of the other parts and reflect the system's basic philosophy.”

Rensis Likert (1903–1981) American statistician

Source: New patterns of management, (1961), p. 222

“Fourteen basic and well-known managing processes make up the components from which a management system for any business can be fashioned.”

Marvin Bower (1903–2003) American business theorist

Source: The Will to Manage (1966), p. 26

“Creating a modeling language that is also an executable language has long been a goal of the software community. Many years ago, in 1968 to be exact, while working with software components to successfully develop a telecommunications system, we created a modeling language that was the forerunner to UML. To model components we used sequence diagrams, collaboration diagrams, and state transition diagrams (a combination of state charts and activity diagrams). Our modeling language then seamlessly translated the component models into code. Each code component was in its turn compiled into an executable component that was deployed in our computer system. The computer system was a component management system—thus we had "components all the way down."”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Source: Executable Uml: A Foundation for Model-Driven Architecture, 2002, p. xxiii: Foreword.

“What is a system? A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system. A system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. The aim of the system must be clear to everyone in the system. The aim must include plans for the future. The aim is a value judgment.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

We are of course talking here about a man-made system.
The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993)

“The management system of an organization must have compatible component parts if it is to function effectively. This conclusion has a very important implication; experiments in organizations must involve internally consistent changes. The traditional atomistic research design is not appropriate for experiments involving organizational theory or management systems. Every aspect of a management system is related to every other part and interacts with it.
The results obtained by altering a single variable or procedure while keeping all others the same usually will yield quite different results from those obtained when that variable is changed along with simultaneous and compatible changes in all other aspects of the management system. The true influence of altering one aspect of the system cannot be determined by varying it and it alone… In experiments involving organizational theory and management systems, therefore, a systems approach must be used. The organic integrity of each system must be maintained while experimental variations are being made.”

Rensis Likert (1903–1981) American statistician

Source: The Human Organization, 1967, p. 123

“A self–organizing system acts autonomously, as if the interconnecting components had a single mind. And as these components spontaneously march to the beat of their own drummer, they organize, adapt, and evolve toward a greater complexity than one would ever expect by just looking at the parts by themselves.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 225

“An organization is a subordinate system of a specific larger system, the cooperative system, whose components are physical, biological, and personal systems. The relations with other organizations… are outside this specific cooperative system. Other organizations are a part of the social environment of the organization. It is for this reason I have used the phrase "complex of organizations" rather than "system." Usually the most significant relationships of a unit organization are those with the specific cooperative system of which it is a part. It is this system which primarily and on the whole in most instances determines the chief conditions of the organization's existence.”

Chester Barnard book The Functions of the Executive

Source: The Functions of the Executive (1938), p. 98-99, footnote

“From the physical point of view the characteristic state of the living organism is that of an open system. A system is closed if no material enters or leaves it; it is open if there is import and export and, therefore, change of the components. Living systems are open systems, maintaining themselves in exchange of materials with environment, and in continuous building up and breaking down of their components.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Von Bertalanffy (1950) " The Theory of Open Systems in Physics and Biology http://vhpark.hyperbody.nl/images/a/aa/Bertalanffy-The_Theory_of_Open_Systems_in_Physics_and_Biology.pdf" In: Science, January 13, 1950, Vol. 111. p. 23
1950s

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