Herbert A. Simon Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision, and the very problem of centralization and decentralization is a problem of arranging the complex system into an effective scheme.

Herbert A. Simon
All behavior involves conscious or unconscious selection of particular actions out of all those which are physically possible to the actor and to those persons over whom he exercises influence and authority.

Herbert A. Simon
Scientific discovery, when viewed in detail, is an excruciatingly slow and painful process.

Herbert A. Simon
Over Christmas, Allen Newell and I created a thinking machine.

Herbert A. Simon
Organizations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests, or knowledge differ. Organization theories describe the delicate conversion of conflict into cooperation, the mobilization of resources, and the coordination of effort that facilitate the joint survival of an organization and its members.

Herbert A. Simon
Whereas economic man maximizes - selects the best alternative from among all those available to him, his cousin, administrative man, satisfices - looks for a course of action that is satisfactory or "good enough."

Herbert A. Simon
We will likely also find that the nature of the problem to be solved will be a principal determinant of the mix. With our growing understanding of the organization of judgmental and intuitive processes, of the specific knowledge that of the specific knowledge that is required to perform particular judgmental tasks, and of the cues that evoke such knowledge in situations in which it is relevant, we have a powerful new tool for improving expert judgment. We can specify the knowledge and the recognition capabilities that experts in a domain need to acquire, and use these specifications for designing appropriate learning procedures.

Herbert A. Simon
If we accept values as given and consistent, if we postulate an objective description of the world as it really is, and if we assume that the decision maker's computational powers are unlimited, then two important consequences follow. First, we do not need to distinguish between the real world and the decision maker's perception of it: he or she perceives the world as it really is. Second, we can predict the choices that will be made by a rational decision maker entirely from our knowledge of the real world and without a knowledge of the decision maker's perceptions or modes of calculation. (We do, of course, have to know his or her utility function.)

Herbert A. Simon
If there were no limits to human rationality administrative theory would be barren. It would consist of the single precept: Always select that alternative, among those available, which will lead to the most complete achievement of your goals.

Herbert A. Simon
It is not my aim to surprise or shock you – but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future – the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.

Herbert A. Simon
Broadly stated, the task is to replace the global rationality of economic man with a kind of rational behavior that is compatible with the access to information and the computational capacities that are actually possessed by organisms, including man, in the kinds of environments in which such organisms exist.

Herbert A. Simon
The fact that goals may be dependent for their force on other more distant ends leads to the arrangement of these goals in a hierarchy - each level to be considered as an end relative to the levels below it and as a mean to the levels above it.

Herbert A. Simon
Organizations and institutions provide the general stimuli and attention-directors that channelize the behaviors of the members of the group, and that provide those members with the intermediate objectives that stimulate action.

Herbert A. Simon
The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.

Herbert A. Simon
The first task of administrative theory is to develop a set of concepts that will permit the description, in terms relevant to the theory, of administrative situations. These concepts, to be scientifically useful, must be operational; that is, their meanings must correspond to empirically observable facts or situations.

Herbert A. Simon
Before a science can develop principles, it must possess concepts. Before a law of gravitation could be formulated, it was necessary to have the notions of acceleration and weight.

Herbert A. Simon
Administration is not unlike play-acting. The task of the good actor is to know and play his role, although different roles may differ greatly in content. The effectiveness of the performance will depend on the effectiveness of the play and the effectiveness with which it is played. The effectiveness of the administrative process will vary with the effectiveness of the organization and the effectiveness with which its members play their parts.

Herbert A. Simon
Modem mainstream economic theory bravely assumes that people make their decisions in such a way as to maximize their utility. Accepting this assumption enables economics to predict a great deal of behavior (correctly or incorrectly) without ever making empirical studies of human actors.

Herbert A. Simon
The techniques of the practitioner are usually called 'synthetic'. He designs by organizing known principles and devices into larger systems.

Herbert A. Simon
The behaviour of individuals is the tool with which the organisation achieves its targets.

Herbert A. Simon
Before we can establish any immutable 'principles' of administration, we must be able to describe, in words, exactly how an administrative organization looks and exactly how it works.

Herbert A. Simon
Roughly speaking, rationality is concerned with the selection of preferred behavior alternatives in terms of some system of values, whereby the consequences of behavior can be evaluated.

Herbert A. Simon
A major task in organizing is to determine, first, where the knowledge is located that can provide the various kinds of factual premises that decisions require.

Herbert A. Simon
Global rationality, the rationality of neoclassical theory, assumes that the decision maker has a comprehensive, consistent utility function, knows all the alternatives that are available for choice, can compute the expected value of utility associated with each alternative, and chooses the alternative that maximizes expected utility. Bounded rationality, a rationality that is consistent with our knowledge of actual human choice behavior, assumes that the decision maker must search for alternatives, has egregiously incomplete and inaccurate knowledge about the consequences of actions, and chooses actions that are expected to be satisfactory (attain targets while satisfying constraints).

Herbert A. Simon
The function of knowledge in the decision-making process is to determine which consequences follow upon which of the alternative strategies. It is the task of knowledge to select from the whole class of possible consequences a more limited subclass, or even (ideally) a single set of consequences correlated with each strategy.

Herbert A. Simon
The principle of bounded rationality [is] the capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world — or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.

Herbert A. Simon
During and after World War II, a large number of academic economists were exposed directly to business life, and had more or less extensive opportunities to observe how decisions were actually made in business organizations. Moreover, those who became active in the development of the new management science were faced with the necessity of developing decision-making procedures that could actually be applied in practical situations. Surely these trends would be conducive to moving the basic assumptions of economic rationality in the direction of greater realism.

Herbert A. Simon
The criterion of efficiency dictates that choice of alternatives which produces the largest result for the given application of resources.

Herbert A. Simon
Computers were within my sphere of attention, but only computers used as number crunchers. In spite of the "giant brain" metaphor, there is little suggestion in this 1950 talk that the most important application of computers might lie in imitating intelligence symbolically, not numerically.

Herbert A. Simon
In order to survive, the organization must have an objective that appeals to its customers, so that they will make the contributions necessary to sustain it. Hence, organization objectives are constantly adapted to conform to the changing values of customers, or to secure new groups of customers in place of customers who have dropped away. The organization may also undertake special activities to induce acceptance of its objectives by customers - advertising, missionary work, and propaganda of all sorts.

Herbert A. Simon