Calling Dr. Spock

The Conference Board Review^® Article

Calling Dr. Spock

In the 1950s, British managers were desperate for counsel.

By Charles Handy

There were once three occupations in Britain for which you required no qualification and for which no training existed: politician, parent, and manager. Unfortunately, they were also three of the most important. Management, in particular, was something that, it was felt, everyone could do at a pinch. Rather like making love, it was something that sensible people instinctively knew how to do, when and as the need arose.

But then, as I discovered, even lovemaking isn't quite as natural as people assumed. Nowadays there is such an abundance of explicit magazines, films, and books demonstrating just what goes where and how that no one can be ignorant of how it should be done, even if not always expert in the execution. I had only a strange magazine called Health and Efficiency, a nudist publication, to acquaint me with some rather bowdlerized photographs of the female body — even James Joyce's Ulysses was banned in the Ireland of my youth. I learnt by experience in due course, but not without much fumbling frustration and gaucherie.

Parenting wasn't much better, although my young wife and I did have Dr. Spock's bible Baby and Child Care at our side, by day and night. Then there were always mothers and mothers-in-law all too eager to advise. Looking back, I can only apologize to our two children. Our daughter once, half jokingly, accused us of using her as a social experiment in her education. She did not know the half of it. All her early life was an experiment, as it inevitably is for the first child of first-time parents.

Management didn't even have a Dr. Spock. There was no decent book, as far as I can recall, back in the 1950s in Britain, to which a would-be manager could go for help. The first remotely readable book, The Human Side of Enterprise, by MIT professor Douglas McGregor, was not published until 1960. Shell was very taken by McGregor's book, in which he distinguished two styles of leadership: Theory X worked on the assumption that people needed to be told what to do, while Theory Y assumed that people could be trusted to act responsibly on their own initiative. Shell memorably sent out a circular to every manager that year, summarizing the book and decreeing that, with immediate effect, Shell would be a Theory Y organization — unaware, presumably, of the confusion they caused by using Theory X to implement Theory Y. Old habits die hard.

The thought of actually going back to school to learn about management struck people as bizarre, or so it certainly seemed to both Oxford and Cambridge universities, which each turned down the invitation from the business community to establish graduate business schools along American lines. "We are not a trade school," one professor said, indignantly. That was in the early '60s, when the government in Britain, urged on by a group of leading businesspeople, had begun to worry about the state of British management and how it might be better educated. It was right to be concerned. Thirty years later, as part of "The Making of Managers," a 1987 report for the government that I chaired, I calculated that almost every business executive at that time would have left school at 15 and had not one day of formal education since. This was because only 8 percent of school-leavers in those days went on to university, and they almost all went into the professions or the civil or colonial services. Business had to make do with the "University of Life," as the managers of the day defiantly termed it.

There were two exceptions: the alumni of the armed services and accountants. The armed services took management seriously. They trained their officers on recruitment and, later, at their staff colleges, where mid-career courses for high-flyers lasting up to a year were the norm. Many British managers in the '50s and '60s had done their national service and had been exposed to the management theories and practices of the armed services. They carried this experience into their new business careers, and for a time the business of Britain bristled with the equivalent of officers' messes, where the managers enjoyed three-course luncheons while the lower orders made do with the works canteen. It often took time for the new ex-servicemen to understand that business organizations operated in a different world, one where the right to command had to be earned and where they could no longer count on the ready acceptance of authority and the privileges that went with it. No one ever suggested that training to fight a war was the right preparation for managing a business. It just happened to turn out that way, the unintended consequence of the national need for military preparedness.

The best preparation, however, for a management role in business was generally thought to be an accountancy qualification. In preparing "The Making of Managers," I unearthed the intriguing fact that Britain had 168,000 qualified accountants, compared with four thousand in West Germany, six thousand in Japan, and twenty thousand in France. We didn't need or use that many accountants. The great majority were not working as accountants at all but, rather, as non-financial managers in business organizations.

There is nothing wrong with accountancy training — for accountants. But accountants are taught to give priority to the visible financial costs and assets, not to the less quantifiable human assets, which they regard as costs. They focus on the past rather than the future, because that alone can be accurately measured and audited. Their training regards risk, uncertainty, and the unknown as undesirable.

People management, at that time, had no place in the curriculum, for money and its measurement was all that mattered. The accountancy professions had, accidentally, become the business schools of Britain. No wonder our economy was lagging behind those of our competitors.

Pages: [1]

Comments? Write a letter to the editor.

Return to the March/April 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.