Remembering Russ Ackoff

Last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal brought the news that Russell Ackoff had passed away at the age of 90, after a long life of influencing management thinking and practice. At the time he was having the most profound impact on my life — when I entered The Wharton School’s PhD. program, and the Center named for him — Russ didn’t even know me. When we met years later, I think he appreciated that he had left a legacy of many students, myself included.

I was the last Ph.D. student ever to graduate from Ackoff’s Social Systems Sciences program (founded in 1980) at The Wharton School. His program was a bit of an anomaly, even at the time. Wildly popular with Wharton’s MBA students, it had an uneasy relationship with the more conventional academic activities of the school. In the Center’s heyday, “Triple S” students did action research with companies, while their peers did statistical analysis of large data sets. His students were interested in ideas that cut across intellectual boundaries. They were pragmatic; some observers thought this left them without sufficient academic rigor. Eventually, because of this uneasy fit, Russ decided to leave the university. He retired in 1986 to found INTERACT, a consulting company. Ironically, his program in the 1980s was pursuing the kind of management training and problem solving that advocates are now urgently calling on business schools to provide.

Ackoff’s ideas had a profound impact on business schools and on several generations of managers. At a time when business schools were becoming increasingly discipline-based and quantitative, he was an ardent advocate for viewing problems systematically, across intellectual boundaries, and with qualitative insight. In the program he designed, we learned to think the way architects do — to construct a whole solution out of constituent parts that work together, rather than to optimize any given piece of the solution. He was involved in businesses as diverse as selling beer, developing the first touch-tone phone, and sorting out incentive problems with public bus drivers. He had learned that all kinds of complex problems could be tackled by first understanding what kind of problem one was facing, then by working to “dissolve” the problem.

Russ never took himself, or the problems people were facing, too seriously. Iconoclastic and humorous in person, his books Management in Small Doses and Ackoff’s Fables encouraged readers to find the humor in business situations. His wonderful writing was accessible to people who wouldn’t exactly have been enthralled to read On Purposeful Systems: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Individual and Social Behavior as a System of Purposeful Events.

What Russ spent his life developing — a systems view of complex problems — has now been so widely adopted that we have forgotten that he was one of a relatively small band of scholars and teachers who pioneered this way of thinking.

Eventually Ackoff resumed his affiliation with Penn. In September 2000, he was honored by the establishment of the Ackoff Center for Advancement of Systems Approaches in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. In 2003, at age 87, he returned to Penn as Distinguished Affiliated Faculty to teach a graduate course in “Systems Thinking Applied to Management” and to advise graduate students.

If you have ever solved a problem not by breaking it down into constituent parts, but by looking at the whole thing systemically, or by re-framing the problem to begin with, you have probably been influenced by Russ Ackoff. He will be missed, but his ideas live on.