Since Aristotle’s claim that knowledge is derived from the understanding of the whole and not that of the single parts (Aristotle’s Holism), researchers have been struggling with systems and parts in terms of their contents and their relative dynamics. This historic effort evolved during the last century into so-called “systems theory” (Bogdanov, 1922, 1980; von Bertalanffy, 1968, Lazlo 1996; Meadows, 2008). Systems theory is an interdisciplinary theory about every system in nature, in society and in many scientific domains as well as a framework with which we can investigate phenomena from a holistic approach (Capra, 1997). Systems thinking comes from the shift in attention from the part to the whole (Checkland, 1997; Weinberg, 2001; Jackson, 2003), considering the observed reality as an integrated and interacting unicuum of phenomena where the individual properties of the single parts become indistinct. In contrast, the relationships between the parts themselves and the events they produce through their interaction become much more important, with the result that “system elements are rationally connected” (Luhmann, 1990), towards a shared purpose (Golinelli, 2009). The systemic perspective argues that we are not able to fully comprehend a phenomenon simply by breaking it up into elementary parts and then reforming it; we instead need to apply a global vision to underline its functioning. Altough we can start from the analysis of the elementary components of a phenomenon, in order to fully comprehend the phenomenon in its entirety we have to observe it also from a higher level: a holistic perspective (von Bertalanffy, 1968). Systems theory encompasses a wide field of research with different conceptualizations and areas of focus (e.g. Boulding 1956, Maturana and Varela 1975, Senge 1990). Specifically, within management and marketing, a number of authors and scholars have adopted – implicitly or explicitly – a vision of organizations as systems with the aim of analyzing the relationship between organizations and their environment (e.g. Burns and Stalker 1961, Lawrence and Lorsch 1967, Aldrich 1979). The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of systems theories. In particular, focus is given to those that make a specific reference to management. We shall focus on: a) A brief review on multidisciplinary systems theories b) The introduction of basic systems concepts c) The managerial applications of systems thinking This commentary closes the special issue of the Journal of Service Science. It hopes to raise questions, observations and dilemmas in order to foster dialogue about the opportunities and limitations of applying systems theory in management studies and practices.