“ As certain pioneers saw even in the early days,
the subject of management is, in essence, complexity,
even though this may not always be clearly recognized
because complexity manifests itself in many different forms.”
Fredmund Malik
Prof. Dr. Fredmund Malik was a scholar of Prof. Dr. Hans Ulrich and a long-time member of his staff. His scientific work was devoted to the fundamentals of cybernetics and system theory and the related opportunities they offered for management. He played a significant part in the development and dissemination of the St. Gallen Management Model.
He worked at the Management Zentrum St. Gallen Foundation as a project leader from 1976 and as a director from 1977. Fredmund Malik is a founder member of the joint-stock company that succeeded the foundation and since 1984 he has been president of the board of Management Zentrum St. Gallen AG. As a university lecturer he has taught or still teaches at the universities of St. Gallen and Innsbruck, and similarly as a visiting professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration.
Whereas all the scientists presented up to this point devoted their life’s work to particular central questions as a prerequisite for a soundly based theoretical structure, Fredmund Malik took things further and integrated this early development work of theirs and the basic sciences of system theory and cybernetics underlying it into a general system for teaching and consultancy in management which also included among its components theories and methods of his own.
At Management Zentrum St. Gallen, he took this as a basis and assembled suitable theories from a vast variety of disciplines and appropriate (even traditional) theories, models, methods and tools to produce a comprehensive management system for effective, viable organizations. His Theory of General Management relates not only to companies, enterprises, institutions and associations of all types and sizes in the economy, in both the public and private sectors, but also to the individual manager.
Fredmund Malik is well known for the often harsh criticism he levels against false doctrines, unthinking swimming with the tide of fashion, and erroneous developments. The predictions he has made have often been amazingly accurate and are based on the profound understanding he has of the ways in which complex systems operate.
In his publications can be found the teachings of pioneers and partners, those of Peter F. Drucker, with whom Fredmund Malik is also associated by ties of friendship, of Friedrich von Hayek, Sir Karl Raimund Popper, Viktor Frankl, and Jean Piaget, of the most important “fathers” of cybernetics Norbert Wiener, W. Ross Ashby, Warren Mc Culloch, Heinz von Foerster and Gregory Bateson, of the Bamberg researchers into complexity Dietrich Dörner and Franz Reither, and of many other important authors.
In their chronological sequence, the publications of Fredmund Malik provide a clear demonstration of how, as development has progressed, it has been possible for the necessary knowledge of cybernetic management to be made increasingly simple and comprehensible and to be brought down to the “grass-roots” level of practical every-day management. In his bestseller “Führen, Leisten, Leben” (available in English as “Managing, Performing, Living”) Malik for the first time achieved what he had always been striving for: to convey the ideas of management cybernetics without having to avail himself of the complicated terminology used in cybernetics.
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