I stumbled on Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer as a freshman in college, and loved the idea of an auto-optimizing business.

Back then I had questions about exactly how such a system could be implemented, the algorithm was very hand wavey, but I assumed surely they must’ve figured it out before writing a book about it.

As an adult with 20 years extra experience, I’m fairly confident that, no, aside from the high level concept, they had no idea how to build such a system. That coup was probably the best possible outcome for Beer - it gave credibility to his ideas without actually testing them.