Cybernetics can describe the process of administering an enterprise including the development of corporate strategy and long range planning on the top and the regulation, coordination and control of such activities as production, accounting, marketing, personnel, research and development in the middle, the supervised operations being performed below.

One key to effective management is the adequate flow of information between and within strategic, functional and operational levels so as to allow for timely and appropriate decisions to be made. Management information systems constitute a technological solution to information flow problems. Another key is the form of control exercised through spelling out objectives, providing incentive schemes for production as well as cooperation, etc.

Emerging from control theory and the feeling that trans-disciplinary enquiry was critical, cybernetics directly influences management theory. Primarily an epistemological stance, cybernetics is informally characterized by the speaker as "the science of describing"; that is, a formal approach to the purpose and nature of this universal human activity. As such, it requires an examination of the subjectivity inherent in all description.

Mathematician, engineer and social philosopher, Dr. Norbert Wiener, coined the word "cybernetics" from the Greek word meaning steersman. He defined it as the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine. In the 17th century, Ampére wanted cybernetics to be the science of government. For philosopher Warren McCulloch, cybernetics was an experimental epistemology concerned with the communication within an observer and between the observer and his environment. Stafford Beer, a management consultant, defined cybernetics as the science of effective organization. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson noted that whereas previous sciences dealt with matter and energy, the new science of cybernetics focuses on form and pattern.