It should become clear to everyone that reads his work that "management theorist" Stafford Beer can best be characterized without any doubt whatsoever as a charlatan.

Cybernetics came out of the Macy conferences [0] and this is where one needs to go, in order to establish context. I also highly recommend Norbert Wiener's biography "Dark Hero of the Information Age" [1] as a good introduction to one of the greatest geniuses of this age, easily eclipsing Shannon and von Neumann.

Principia Cybernetica [2] is another good resource.

[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo23...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Hero-Information-Age-Cybernetics...

[2] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/

Wizards for me falls flat (kinda like "soul of a new machine" that's often recommended but which I found a complete waste of time) while the Dream Machine, Dealers of Lightning [1] and Norbert Wiener's biography [2] are all essential reading.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Hero-Information-Age-Cybernetics...

I agree with this sentiment. "Dark Hero of the Information Age" https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Hero-Information-Age-Cybernetics... lays out how both Weiner and Shannon created information theory independently but Weiner took it further; incorporating feedback as a way of lowering the entropy and helping lay the path for today's ML revolution. The book goes on to lay out how Weiner's growing popularity in the Soviet Union and socialist views (he feared automation leading to unemployment) led to the blacklisting of his contributions within the academic community. Its no wander that the first trained Deep (more than three layers) Neural network with published in a Soviet Cybernetics journal in 1970.