The basic managerial idea introduced by systems thinking, is that to manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts ra… - Russell L. Ackoff

Because a cause was taken to be sufficient for its effect, nothing was required to explain the effect other than the cause. Consequently, the quest for causes was environment-free. It employed what we now call 'closed-system' thinking. Laws. —like that of freely falling bodies—-were formulated so as to exclude environmental effects.

A mission statement should define the business that the organization wants to be in, not necessarily what it is in.

Despite the importance of systems concepts and the attention that they have received and are receiving, we do not yet have a unified or integrated set (i.e., a system) of such concepts. Different terms are used to refer to the same thing and the same term is used to refer to different things. This state is aggravated by the fact that the literature of systems research is widely dispersed and is therefore difficult to track. Researchers in a wide variety of disciplines and interdisciplines are contributing to the conceptual development of the systems sciences but these contributions are not as interactive and additive as they might be.