罗素·艾可夫的Work

　　Throughout the years Ackoff's work in research, consulting and education has involved more than 250 corporations and 50 governmental agencies in the U.S. and abroad.

　　Operations research

　　Russell Ackoff has had a distinguished career in Operations Research both as an academic and as a practitioner. His book Introduction to Operations Research, co-authored with C. West Churchman and Leonard Arnoff from 1957 appeared as a pioneering text that helped define the field. His influence on the early development of the discipline in the USA and in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s is hard to over-estimate. However, by the 1970s he had become trenchant in his criticisms of technique-dominated Operations Research, and powerfully advocated more participative approaches. These criticisms have had limited resonance within the USA, but were picked up in Britain, where they helped to stimulate the growth of problem structuring methods, such as Soft systems methodology from Peter Checkland.

　　The nature of science

　　Ackoff believed that the need to synthesize findings in the many disciplines of science arises because these disciplines have been developed with relatively unrelated conceptual systems. Scientific development has resulted in the grouping of phenomena into smaller and smaller classes, and in the creation of disciplines specializing in each. As disciplines multiply, each increases in depth and decreases in breadth. Collectively, however, they extend the breadth of scientific knowledge.

　　Nature does not come to us in disciplinary form. Phenomena are not physical, chemical, biological, and so on. The disciplines are the ways we study phenomena; they emerge from points of view, not from what is viewed. Hence the disciplinary nature of science is a filing system of knowledge. Its organization is not to be confused with the organization of nature itself.

　　Purposeful systems

　　In 1972 Ackoff wrote a book with Frederick Edmund Emery about purposeful systems, which focused on the question how systems thinking relates to human behaviour. Individual systems are purposive, they said, knowledge and understanding of their aims can only be gained by taking into account the mechanisms of social, cultural, and psychological systems.

　　They characterize human systems as purposeful systems whose members are also purposeful individuals who intentionally and collectively formulate objectives and are parts of larger purposeful systems:

A purposeful system or individual is ideal-seeking if it chooses another objective that more closely approximates its ideal. An ideal-seeking system or individual is necessarily one that is purposeful, but not all purposeful entities seek ideals. The capability of seeking ideals may well be a characteristic that distinguishes man from anything he can make, including computers.

　　The fact that these systems were experiencing profound change could be attributed to the end of the "Machine Age" and the onset of the "Systems Age". The Machine Age, bequeathed by the Industrial Revolution, was underpinned by two concepts of reductionism and mechanism whereby "all phenomena were believed to be explained by using only one ultimately simple relationship, cause-effect", which in the Systems Age are replaced by expansionism and teleology with producer-product replacing cause-effect. "Expansionism is a doctrine maintaining that all objects and events, and all experiences of them, are parts of larger wholes." According to Ackoff, the beginning of the end of the Machine Age and the beginning of the Systems Age could be dated to the 1940s, a decade when philosophers, mathematicians, and biologists, building on developments in the interwar period, defined a new intellectual framework.

　　f-Laws

　　In 2006, Ackoff worked with Herbert J. Addison and Sally Bibb. They developed the term f-Law to describe each in a collection of subversive epigrams, co-authored with Herbert J. Addison. The f-Laws expose the common flaws in both the practice of leadership and in the established beliefs that surround it. According to Ackoff f-Laws are truths about organizations that we might wish to deny or ignore - simple and more reliable guides to managers' everyday behaviour than the complex truths proposed by scientists, economists, sociologists, politicians and philosophers.