by Milan Zeleny (Fordham University, USA)

Milan Zeleny, Professor of Management Systems, Fordham University at New York, holds a Dipl.Ing. from the Prague School of Economics, an MS and a PhD from the University of Rochester. His previous academic appointments were at Columbia University School of Business, University of South Carolina, Copenhagen School of Economics, European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (Brussels), School of Advanced Technology at SUNY in Binghamton, Irish Management Institute (Dublin), Department of Architecture of the University of Naples, Centro Studi di Estimo e di Economia Territoriale in Florence, EPFL in Lausanne, and Contract of Excellence at the University of Padua. Currently he holds visiting professorships at Xidian University of Xi'an, China, and at the Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Czech Republic. Dr Zeleny is also the principal of ZET-Organization consultancy, President of the Central European Productivity Center (allied with Productivity International) and Director of the Czech Productivity Center in Prague. He is the author of more than 350 professional papers and articles, ranging from operations research, cybernetics and general systems, to economics, knowledge management, total quality management, and simulation models of autopoiesis and artificial life (AL). Articles on Integrated Process Management (IPM), Bata-System and Mass Customization were translated into Japanese and others into Chinese, French, Italian, Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Russian and Polish. (He has also published over 500 short stories, literary essays and newspaper articles in Czech, Slovak and English.) He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Human Systems Management, an international journal. Presently serving on editorial boards of International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making and International Journal of Innovation and Learning, he has previously served on editorial boards of International Journal of Operations and Quantitative Management, Journal of International Strategic Management, Operations Research, Computers & Operations Research, Future Generations Computer Systems, Fuzzy Sets and Systems, General Systems Yearbook and Prestige Journal of Management and Research. Dr Zeleny has been awarded the Erskine Fellow, University of Canterbury; The Georg Cantor Award, International Society of MCDM; the USIA Fulbright Professor, Prague, Czechoslovakia; the A Bernstein Memorial Lecturer, Tel-Aviv, Israel; the Alexander von Humboldt Award, Bonn, Germany; the Rockefeller Foundation Resident Scholar, Study Center; and the Norbert Wiener Award. Dr Zeleny has recently published the Handbook of Information Technology in Business for Thomson International and the New Frontiers of Decision Making for the Information Technology Era for World Scientific. Among his earlier books are Multiple Criteria Decision Making (McGraw-Hill), Linear Multiobjective Programming (Springer-Verlag); Autopoiesis, Dissipative Structures and Spontaneous Social Orders (Westview Press), MCDM-Past Decades and Future Trends (JAI Press), Autopoiesis: A Theory of Living Organization (Elsevier North Holland), Uncertain Prospects Ranking and Portfolio Analysis (Verlag Anton Hain), Multiple Criteria Decision Making (University of So. Carolina Press), Multiple Criteria Decision Making: Kyoto 1975 (Springer-Verlag) and several others.
 

Human Systems Management is an important work that integrates knowledge, management and systems into a unified world of thinking and action in business, decision-making and economics. It presents a modern synthesis of the fields of knowledge management, systems science and human organization. A biological rather than mechanistic perspective pervades the text. New and original ideas and approaches are presented with the simplicity and clarity typical of the well-known author.