Term coined by Norbert Wiener.

Management cybernetics : As applied to management, [Stafford Beer] defines cybernetics as "the science of effective organization."

• related to Operations Research? [Management Science]?

When military forces loyal to Gen. [Augusto Pinochet] staged a coup here (in [ChilE]) in September 1973, they made a surprising discovery. [Salvador Allende]'s Social Ist government had quietly embarked on a novel experiment to manage Chile's economy using a clunky mainframe computer and a network of telex machines. The project, called [Cyber Syn], was the brainchild of A. [Stafford Beer], a visionary Briton who employed his "cybernetic" concepts to help Mr. Allende find an alternative to the planned economies (Planned Economy) of CuBa and the Soviet Union... Cybersyn was born in July 1971 when Fernando Flores, then a 28-year-old government technocrat, sent a letter to Mr. Beer seeking his help in organizing Mr. Allende's economy by applying cybernetic concepts... Cybersyn's turning point came in October 1972, when a strike by truckers and retailers nearly paralyzed the economy. The interconnected telex machines, exchanging 2,000 messages a day, were a potent instrument, enabling the government to identify and organize alternative transportation resources that kept the economy moving... The military never could grasp Cybersyn, and finally dismantled the operations room. Several other Cybersyn team members went into exile. Mr. Flores, who was both economy and finance minister in the Allende government, spent three years in military concentration camps. After his release, he moved with his family to California to study at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. He later was one of the inventors of the Coordinator, a program that tracked spoken commitments between workers within a company, one of the first forays into "Work Flow" software. He became a millionaire and returned to Chile, where today he is a senator representing the Tarapaca Region.

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