The systems approach, or holistic thinking, has a very long history. It was no until the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, with the publication of Wiener's work on cybernetics (1948) and von Bertalanffy's on "general system theory" (1950,1968), that it bagan to take on the form of a discipline. The approach was popular and immediately successful, and system thinking from the 1950s to the 1970s was far and away the most important influence on the management sciences and a number of other fields.
