H. Igor Ansoff

Harry Igor Ansoff (рус. Игорь Ансов; original surname is Ansov) (December 12, 1918 – July 14, 2002) was a Russian American applied mathematician and business manager. He is known as the father of strategic management.

Igor Ansoff was born in Vladivostok, Russia, on December 12, 1918. His father was an American born Russian from Evansville, Indiana and his mother was Russian from Moscow.

At the time of Igor’s birth, Ansoff senior was secretary to the American Consul General in Moscow, David R. Francis, and had just completed a cross-Siberian trip on behalf of the American Red Cross, examining living conditions in prisoner of war camps. This concluded with a trip to Japan in 1918 following which the family moved to Vladivostok. The United States had a large military and industrial presence in the Far East of Russia, with more than 3,000 troops on the ground under the command of General Graves. During the six years that it took for the Bolshevik revolution to make its way to Vladivostok, US embassies were slowly being shut and their contents moved east. Many strategic records ended up in Tokyo and were destroyed in an earthquake and fire. Most of the rest of the embassy documents made their way to Vladivostok.

The Ansoff’s lived in Vladivostok until the US Embassy closed in 1924, whereupon they returned to Moscow, with Ansoff senior now a Soviet citizen. They travelled the 9,000 km’s on the trans-siberian railway crossing Siberia in the middle of winter where temperatures of minus 35 Celsius are common. The cattle cars of the trans-siberian were heated by coal burning stoves and the occupants slept on straw laid out on timber bunks.

With his father's American origin, and his mother's "capitalist" background (her father had owned a small samovar factory in the town of Tula some hundred miles south of Moscow) the Ansoff’s were suspect as members of the "bourgeoisie" who were assumed to harbor their "counterrevolutionary" hopes and tendencies.

Igor’s life in Moscow engendered in him a distrust of any system (political or organizational) that claimed to be too perfect, too tidy. This spirit “expressed itself through my inability to join other ‘systems’ in which I lived, studied and worked. It reinforced my drive to excel in order to force the system to recognize and reward me. And perversely, it also drove me to excel through making innovative contributions which challenged the systems cultures” (Ansoff, 1992)

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