H. Igor Ansoff, a retired educator and author whose visionary theories on strategic business management inspired worldwide acclaim, died in 2002. He was 83.
The cause of death was complications of pneumonia, said Mink Stavenga, dean of the business college at Alliant International University.
Dr. Ansoff, who died at Silverado Senior Living, taught 17 years at U.S. International University before retiring two years ago as a distinguished professor emeritus. USIU became Alliant International University in July 2001.
An applied mathematician, Dr. Ansoff shifted his emphasis to economics in the 1950s while employed by RAND Corp., a brain trust created by the U.S. Air Force.
In 1956, he took a job as a planning specialist for Lockheed Aircraft Corp., gaining practical experience in analyzing the complexities of a business environment. It was his introduction into the "real world" of business management, he would later say.
Dr. Ansoff left Lockheed in 1963 to teach at the graduate school of Carnegie Mellon University and complete the first of five books, the ground-breaking "Corporate Strategies."
The book, which explored the need for corporate managers to prepare for the future by anticipating changes in the firm's environment, was translated into several foreign languages.
By the time he joined the USIU faculty in 1983, creating the school's strategic management program, he had been called "the father of strategic management" by Henry Mintzberg, one of the leading researchers in the field.
Yet Dr. Ansoff was probably better known in Europe and Japan than in the United States, said Stavenga and USIU graduate Peter M. Antoniou.
"He was considered way too much on the frontier in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, even though a lot of European countries were applying his strategies," Antoniou said. "The U.S. considered it too complex. The more complex the business environment, the better it applies, and now U.S. companies are coming closer to what he proposed in the 1970s."
Dr. Ansoff theorized that if a company becomes purely self-serving it soon loses track of its direction and dies. He believed long-term profitability results from a commitment to understanding the political and social fabric of a community.
His strategic success hypothesis, formulated in his last book, The New Corporate Strategy, contends that the financial performance of a firm is maximized whenever both the strategy and management capability match the turbulence of the firm's environment.
He proposed approaches to accommodate what he called five "turbulence levels" in the business environment ranging from placid and predictable to highly changeable and unpredictable.
In his book Strategic Management, Dr. Ansoff broadened strategic planning into a multidisciplinary process, adding individual and group dynamics, political processes and organizational culture.
Stavenga said Dr. Ansoff made an immediate impact at USIU, attracting students from all over the world who have gone on to validate his theories.
"His popularity and fame are equal to that of Peter Drucker as a management guru," Stavenga said.
Through his private consulting firm, Ansoff Associates, Dr. Ansoff advised such major companies as General Electric, Philips, IBM, Gulf Oil, General Foods and Westinghouse.
Every two years, the Ansoff Strategic Management Award is presented to an individual who significantly contributes to the development of strategic thinking.
Dr. Ansoff was born in Vladivostok, Russia, and moved to the United States with his parents at 17.
Despite limited knowledge of English, he graduated at the top of his class at New York's elite Stuyvesant High School in 1937. He earned master's degrees in math and physics and in general engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.
During World War II and into 1946, he was a member of the U.S. Naval Reserve. He served as a liaison with the Russian Navy and as an instructor in physics at the U.S. Naval Academy.
In 1948, before joining RAND Corp., he received a doctorate in applied mathematics at Brown University. He also was awarded five honorary doctorates over the years.
Dr. Ansoff held a joint appointment for seven years at the Stockholm School of Economics and at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management. Based in Brussels, Belgium, at the time, he was looking for a more moderate climate and found it in San Diego. While based at USIU, he lived in Scripps Ranch.