1,721,183 research outputs found
Systems Thinking. Intelligence in action.
No full textThe core belief underlying this book is that the most useful and effective models to strengthen our intelligence are system ones, developed following the logic of Systems Thinking. Such models can explore complexity, dynamics, and change, and it is the author s view that intelligence depends on the ability to construct models of this nature. The book is designed to allow the reader not only to acquire simple information on Systems Thinking but above all to gradually learn the logic and techniques that make this way of thinking an instrument for the improvement of intelligence. In order to aid the learning and practice of the Systems Thinking discipline, the author has abandoned a rigid formal language for a more discursive style. He writes in the first person, with an ample number of citations and critical analyses, and without ever giving in to the temptation to use formal mathematics
The joint-location of firms in a given area.
No full textThis study considers the phenomenon of the joint-location of firms, which may assume different forms:
- Conglomerate joint-location, typical of industrial and commercial areas;
- Specialist joint-location, typical of business industrial areas;
- Vertically-integrated joint-location, typical of "filières";
- Integrated joint-location, typical of networks;
- Neck joint-location, arriving and departing.
The joint-location phenomenon is explained applying the theory of Combinatory Systems, created by the Author
The Pillars of Learning. Understanding, Studying and Explaining
No full textThis paper is based on the hypothesis that intelligent persons have a high capacity to understand and learn effectively, because processes involving study and explanation allow them to develop the capacity to construct a system of coherent models that can be quickly updated. The first part of the paper will highlight the logic and power of systemic understanding and learning that is founded in Systems Thinking. It is clear that understanding and learning represent different mental activities: We understand when we form a coherent model of a concept, but we learn only when that model becomes stable and permanent; when it is memorized so that we can repeat and apply it. There is no learning without studying. For this reason, the second part of the paper proposes ten steps for studying effectively (which permits understanding) and efficiently (using minimum effort). But how do we attain understanding? Often we reach understanding through personal experience; in most cases, however, we are helped by a professor, a teacher or a textbook that provides us with an explanation. The explanation process represents the topic of the third part of the paper, where the author considers the five most important structures of the explanation process—the common, classical, procedural, systemic and teleological structures. In this sense, Understanding, Studying and Explaining can be considered the three pillars on which are based learning and knowledge
Intelligence and Stupidity - The Educational Power of Cipolla’s Test and of the “Social Wheel”
No full textThis paper will present the model Carlo Cipolla developed in his worldwide best-selling essay on “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” along with the framework of social behaviors it contains. Cipolla did not intend to explore intelligence but to focus primarily in his analysis on stupidity, two characteristics of the social behavior that man, as an individual or group agent, can reveal when he interacts in social groups and organizations of all types and sizes. More generally, Cipolla put forth a simple framework that classified the behavior of the man/actor in a social or organized group based on the advantages and disadvantages such behavior brought to the actor and the group of which he is a part. According to the author, all group individual behavior can be qualified according to two parameters: 1) advantages or disadvantages to the actor, and 2) advantages or disadvantages for “others”. The combination of these parameters produces the four individual types: 1) Intelligent people, 2) Helpless/Naive people, 3) the Bandit and 4) the Stupid person. This general outline is so simple that it represents a powerful and effective educational tool to make people aware of how they can be guided when they interact with other individuals. Therefore, Cipolla’s book is used in schools, universities and training courses for managers to send an educational message: behave intelligently and avoid stupidity, because “the Stupid person is more dangerous than the Bandit”. This study seeks to demonstrate that when a third parameter is introduced—The volition or lack thereof of the actor to cause advantages to others—four other types of individual can be added to Cipolla’s original typology:
1) the Able or Capable person, 2) the Hero, 3) the Incapable person, and 4) the Egoist. These eight types can be represented in a circular model that I have termed the Social Wheel, which increases the educational power of Cipolla’s idea. The paper will show that “the Incapable person is more dangerous than the Stupid one”
Le condizioni di successo del budgetingFunzioni tradizionali e innovative del processo di budgeting
No full textIl controllo della gestione ha nella pianificazione strategica e nella programmazione operativa – che si traduce nel budget d'esercizio – gli strumenti fondamentali tramite i quali il controllo non si limita alla semplice verifica dei risultati, ma può porre in atto una serie di comportamenti, ai vari livelli dell’impresa, tramite i quali i manager possono guidare la gestione nella direzione indicata a livello di programma e, prima ancora, a livello di piano.
La logica fondamentale del controllo di gestione mediante programmazione e budgeting è quella di predeterminare – con un'attenta analisi delle interrelazioni, un'attendibile previsione, e un sistema razionale di decisioni – i valori di tutte le variabili quantitative del sistema aziendale – volumi, prezzi, ore di lavoro, consumi, costi, stocks, flussi finanziari e di cassa e così via – tenendo conto delle relazioni reciproche, mediante formule di trasformazione nel tempo, e di assegnare a tali variabili i valori ritenuti più razionali per il conseguimento di obiettivi di economicità e di redditività.
Tramite il budgeting, in particolare, si realizza un controllo di efficacia e di efficienza, per eccezioni, della gestione d’impresa; di efficacia, in quanto mirante al conseguimento di obiettivi; di efficienza, in quanto tendente a verificare l’ottimale impiego delle risorse; per eccezioni in quanto si concentra sulle situazioni che si discostano in modo rilevante dai valori programmati
The Firm Interpreted as Operating System for Efficient Transformation
No full textAn autonomous business-for-profit organization that develops a business portfolio and activates a financing portfolio, accepting the system of risks, and that is constituted in order to maintain its Equity financially integral, and that thus pursues the max roe, is defined as a capitalistic firm. When viewed as viable systems, capitalistic firms can be interpreted as operating systems for efficient transformation that carry out five parallel transformations,
a. a productive transformation of factors into production;
b. an economic transformation of costs and revenues into operating income;
c. a financial transformation of capital into returns in order to maintain the financial integrity;
d. an entrepreneurial transformation of information into strategies, which leads to a continual readjustment of the firm's strategic position;
e. a managerial (organizational) transformation of strategies into actions of management control
Controllo di gestione
No full textIl testo ha per oggetto il controllo di gestione — dell’impresa e nell’impresa — inteso nel suo significato più ampio, cioè quale momento dell’attività imprenditoriale in cui si decide e si programma l’evoluzione del sistema aziendale e si controlla che l’evoluzione effettuale si conformi a quella programmata, per consentire all’impresa il conseguimento degli obiettivi posti dal management.
Poiché si ritiene che il controllo di gestione debba essere interpretato come il momento applicativo delle nozioni di teoria studiate dall’economia aziendale, quest’opera sviluppa la logica seguita dal management, per assumere le decisioni e sviluppare i controlli necessari per provocare la dinamica dell’impresa.
Tanto la complessità quanto la vastità degli strumenti e delle tecniche di controllo di gestione sono in continuo aumento, sia per il naturale fervore concettuale che caratterizza gli studi e le applicazioni aziendali, in un ambiente sempre più dinamico e mutevole, sia perché il mutato contesto ambientale in cui tali strumenti devono trovare applicazione richiede un loro continuo adattamento e rinnovamento, sia, infine, per la riconosciuta possibilità di impiegare nel controllo di gestione] gli strumenti concettuali e tecnici offerti da altre scienze e discipline, prime fra tutte la ricerca operativa e la teoria dei sistemi.
Tra l’ampliamento «orizzontale» della gamma degli argomenti trattati e lo sviluppo «verticale» di ciascuno, si è preferita la prima possibilità: ho pertanto cercato di offrire al lettore un’articolazione quanto più ampia possibile delle tecniche elaborate per il controllo di gestione, limitando l’approfondimento analitico ai fondamenti logici di base (non solo a quelli elementari), proprio per consentire ali’«utente» di formarsi un quadro concettuale ampio e coerente e di completare con la lettura di testi monografici specialistici gli eventuali ulteriori sviluppi analitici
The Holonic Revolution. Holons, Holarchies and Holonic Networks. The Ghost in the Production Machine
No full textIn order to understand how things are evolving in a context where there is a con-nection between firm and production organization we need a conceptual framework that does not limit our observations to the single production units, searching therein for the laws of survival, but one which, at least in principle, is able to explain how the large orgonic networks internally produce self-organization and self-development.
The theory of systems provides two particularly interesting approaches: one that considers firms as adaptive systems that operate according to local rules and that spon-taneously and inevitably generate production networks understood as complex adaptive systems, and that which considers production organizations as holons that, given their arrangement in a multi-level holarchy, generate the production networks in which pro-gress appears as the inevitable consequence of the holarchic ordering of the Economic-Production Kosmos.
This essay considers the second approach, presenting the holarchic model of the analysis of production networks. It assumes that in an economy based on knowledge, where the limits of time and space are tenuous, production must increasingly refer not to a single firm but to a system of firms (a super-organizational network) or to oper-ational units (inter-organizational network) conceived of as an operative, information or cognitive network.
It truly appears there is a Ghost in the Machine, whose invisible hand produces growing levels of productivity and quality, increases the quality and quantity of satis-fied needs and aspirations, and reduces the burden of work, thereby continually increas-ing the level of progress in the entire Kosmos
The 100 towers of medieval Pavia: a social phenomenon explained by the Combinatory Systems approach
No full textA Combinatory Automaton is a simple tool to simulate combinatory systems. This is
composed of a lattice, each of whose cells contains a variable representing the state of an
agent. The value of each cell at time th depends on a synthetic global variable whose values
derive from some operation carried out on the values of the cells; this variable represents the
synthetic state of the automaton. The micro-macro feedback connects the analytical values of
the cells and the synthetic state of the automaton. With the aid of a simple probabilistic
combinatory automaton I shall simulate a very strange but meaningful phenomenon: the
formation of the towered town of Pavia, Italy, which is unique in all the world, as can be
observed in the historical descriptions or by a visit to this ancient Italian town
Le rimanenze di magazzino : valutazione, rilevazione, controllo
No full textLa valutazione del magazzino, insieme con l'ammortamento delle immobilizzazioni tecniche, rappresenta, per le imprese industriali e mercantili, il fondamentale problema di valutazione per la significativa redazione del bilancio d'esercizio.
Questo studio monografico si propone di illustrare tutte le fasi della valutazione e della contabilizzazione delle rimanenze, proponendo un'innovativa ed efficiente procedura per arrivare a una valutazione oggettiva del magazzino. In particolare, viene, per la prima volta, trattato in modo esauriente il metodo di valutazione noto come Metodo del dettaglio, per il quale manca ogni informazione nei principi contabili
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