personal finance The top organization might well look like this : Managing Director (Executive Board, M.D., Sales, Works, & Design Directors, and Company Secretary) Deflign Director Works Director Sales Director Secretary Chief Accountant Objectives of company policy are hammered out by the Executive Board which, in the event of some major decision, may consult the fuller Board, which might have on it some parttime members. These executives, so far as they are able, should keep themselves clear of detail. They should be concerned with policy rather than crisis. They should, above all, work as a team. It has become clear that a small, closely knit, mutually trusting group is most likely to provide the right kind of policymaking, objectivesetting leadership. It is almost a law of nature that one or two members of such a team will emerge as the leaders, the men or women who through sheer force of character and ability are turned to by the others for the final judgement, but in general the conception of the dominating Number One is slowly dying. The complexity of management, the range of knowledge required, make this so. Examination of the top structure of most successful businesses will show how this team concept is replacing the former idea of the allpowerful.chief executive, usually surrounded by secondrate, sycophantic nonentities. Such a man, in today's management conditions. needs to be three people : he has to combine benevolence (courtesy to workers at staff parties and a pleasant personality with shareholders and the press) with dynamism (the zestful energy of the man of action) and with erudition (the ability to think deeply, to plan ahead, to take a philosophical, detached view of his task). Such a man hardly ever exists. Plato wrote of balancing temperaments and that is precisely what a top executive group needs today. The real problem is the mammoth company in which the top management team inevitably becomes more and more removed from the daytoday 'feel' of the operation and its stresses and strains, while it expends much energy in the struggle for the succession. Some years ago it was revealed by a study undertaken in the U.S.A. that some of the bestrun large businesses are those in which the salary levels of the top executives are much the same, so that there is not that dizzy height of financial reward to scale if any one of the top few wants to reach the summit. There must be much to be said for the team whose standard of living is broadly parallel: when the managing director occupies a stately home and the other directors service flats, there are bound to be disturbing tensions! Given, then, that a sound top management team is in charge of the twoplant operation under discussion, how does the Works Director, for example, make sure that crises are cod with so that every minute of his day, when his mind should be thinking outwards rather than inwards, is usefully filled? An organization that suggests itself in this instance would look like this : Works Director Buyer Personnel Production Production Maintenance Transport Works Manager Manager Manager Engineer & Despatch Accountant 'A' Plant 'B' Plant If the Works Director has sufficient faith in the quality of the seven men he has selected for these key delegated jobs, he will leave the crises to them. Household