to buy a house The manager who is in any way suspect is doomed. There is, it is true, a sadly topical angle to this subject. With the growth of taxation and controls, in fact in the complex conditions of trading today, a great deal of time has to be spent fighting battles with the authorities. This is a commentary on our times and the battle is unlikely to decrease in tempo. What should a manager who rates integrity high do about this situation? I low far should he compromise his high standards? He would be an imprudent man who attempted easy answers to these questions. On balance, it is clearly better to respect regulations, reserving always the right to fight them rather than cheat when there are anomalies and injustices. There is no very great respect from lower down for a manager who is known to be defrauding the authorities, however iniquitous the law may be. This aspect of management integrity is very much in the forefront today. While there might be momentary admiration, for example, for a manager who has twisted the Revenue's tail, it is doubtful whether, in the long term, that same manager will be entirely trusted by his own people. However limited, or large, the management sphere may be, this surely applies. The 'wide boy', be he a foreman or a chairman, is an unattractive, untrustworthy figure. Honesty in the. sense used here is truth, and with truth there is no compromise. In the last analysis, the job of the manager is to retain the confidence of those he is managing. Without such confidence his authority is dissipated. It is important not to confuse sharp practices with acumen and enterprise. The resourceful manager can deploy his resourcefulness without compromising his standards. This is easy to say, but it constitutes a considerable challenge to management; it often seems so much simpler to achieve a certain end by the adroit use of questionable methods. A recurring example is in the field of staff relations. A manager will sometimes go to tortuous lengths to avoid speaking frankly and fearlessly to a subordinate about a fault. With acumen, i.e. choosing the psychological moment, and enterprise, i.e. finding an original, not too wounding, way to communicate, a rapidly deteriorating staff situation can be saved. To try to find less straightforward ways of telling a man where he stands, to employ a third party, or to trump up some irrelevant device is the opposite of good management. In a wider context, acumen and enterprise are management qualities of great worth. Are they instinctive gifts or can they be learnt ? Are they the result of hardwon experience? Can they stand by themselves? Are they complementary? Answering the first two questions together, it would seem that these are qualities that are innate, but that they can both be developed with education and experience. It is doubtful whether true acumen the ability shrewdly and penetratingly to assess a situation can be developed by someone not born with an instinctive discernment and sense of discrimination. Financehome