Beer S. Management Science. The Business Use of Operations Resarch 1968

Textbook in PDF format

Processes and Policies.
An Art, Yes, But a Science Too.
Figures Are Not Enough.
The Beginnings of Operational Research.
Lessons From Early Experience.
System, Prediction, and Profit.
Understand First, Diagnose Second, Prescribe Third.
Chance, Risk, and Malice.
Getting to Grips with Chance.
The Use of Approximation.
How Simple is a Simple Situation?
How Near is Near Enough?
The Likelihood of Getting Near Enough.
Putting Probability Theory Into Action.
Assessing the Ideal Stock Size.
Keeping the Queue to Acceptable Length.
The Genuinely Calculated Risk.
Quantified Insight.
The Situation and Its Models.
The Scientist’s Model.
Meeting Deadlines in a Complex Operation.
Delay and Amplified Delay.
Models as Media for Simulation.
The Payoff of Simulation.
An Alphabet of Models.
Acoustics.
Biology.
Cybernetics.
Demography.
Engineering.
Fluid Dynamics.
Genetics.
Models and Mapping.
The Cones of Resolution.
It Works.
The Limitations of Techniques As Such.
Modelling the Real-life Situation.
Using Techniques to Answer Real-life Questions.
When Reducing Costs Looked Too Costly.
Getting Past the Paradox to the Problem.
Getting Past the Problem to the Solution.
The Viable Governor.
Implicit Control.
What Should be Controlled?
Homeostasis and Ultrastability.
A New Model.
The Education of Systems.
Automation and Such.
Industry and Evolution.
What’s Holding Things Up?
Rethinking About Rethinking.
Why Not Just Leave Things to Evolve?
We’ll-Learn-in-Time-Diehards.
Death of a Diehard