gained by taking into account the mechanisms of social, cultural, and psychological systems". Any human-created systems can be characterized as "purposeful system" when its "members are also purposeful individuals who intentionally and collectively formulate objectives and are parts of larger purposeful systems". Other characteristics are: "A purposeful system or individual is ideal-seeking if... it chooses another objective that more closely approximates its ideal".<ref name="AER06">R.L. Ackoff et al. (2006) On purposeful systems: an interdisciplinary analysis of individual and ... p.241.</ref> "An ideal-seeking system or individual is necessarily one that is purposeful, but not all purposeful entities seek ideals", and "The capability of seeking ideals may well be a characteristic that distinguishes man from anything he can make, including computers". According to Kirby and Rosenhead (2005), "the fact that these systems were experiencing profound change could be attributed to the end of the "Machine Age" and the onset of the "Systems Age". The Machine Age, bequeathed by the Industrial Revolution, was underpinned by two concepts – reductionism (everything can in the end be decomposed into indivisible parts) and mechanism (cause-effect relationships)". Hereby "all phenomena were believed to be explained by using only one ultimately simple relationship, cause-effect", which in the Systems Age are replaced by expansionism and teleology with producer-product replacing cause-effect. "Expansionism is a doctrine maintaining that all objects and events, and all experiences of them, are parts of larger wholes." According to Ackoff, "the beginning of the end of the Machine Age and the beginning of the Systems Age could be dated to the 1940s, a decade when philosophers, mathematicians, and biologists, building on developments in the interwar period, defined a new intellectual framework". f-Laws In 2006, Ackoff worked with Herbert J. Addison and Sally Bibb. They developed the term f-Law to describe a series of over 100 distilled observations of bad leadership and the misplaced wisdom that often surrounds management in organizations. A collection of subversive epigrams published in two volumes by Triarchy Press, these f-Laws expose the common flaws in both the practice of leadership and in the established beliefs that surround it. According to Ackoff "f-Laws are truths about organizations that we might wish to deny or ignore – simple and more reliable guides to managers' everyday behavior than the complex truths proposed by scientists, economists, sociologists, politicians and philosophers". White House Communications Agency In collaboration with Dr. J. Gerald Suarez, Ackoff's ideas were introduced and implemented