homemoney to purchasehow Character was the best help up the ladder and character was the main qualification for management. Experience they must have also, but they would gather plenty of this on the way up. Even hindsight does not justify finding serious fault with this recipe; two parts character and one of experience. Was not British industry nourished by it in its swift rise from the cottage looms of the seventeenth century to the mills and workshops of the nineteenth ? The men who covered Britain in a network of canals and railways, who took the infant sciences of electricity, heat engines, and chemistry and developed them into great industries had no management courses or executive development programmes, but they seemed to manage very well without! f And yet today the training of managers is one of the liveliest topics of discussion. Management courses thrive and multiply; many large companies have their training departments and even those who don't at least pay management training the compliment of feeling guilty about it! Nor is this a quirk of the British character : if anything Britain lags behind other European countries, while America is an exciting and even bewildering pullulation of training theories and practice. This evidence of effort and interest need not be taken as unquestionable proof that the conscious organized training of managers is in fact necessary. The hardheaded businessman who never puts money into anything without good reason is as much a myth as Economic Man or Freudian Man; businessmen are as adept as are artists and poets at chasing the willofthewisp. And yet there are some features of the current development of training that command attention and show that it is more than just another management fashion. It has lasted longer than most fashions, and indeed is becoming sturdier every year. It has withstood the critical onslaught of many jealous disciplines from outside industry, and is even showing the ability to take them into alliance and adapt them to its purposes. To understand why business, which has developed so successfully for so many decades, should need organized training for its managers one needs to look at the changes in business itself, rather than any special values or discoveries in the nature and practice of training. In fact, the development of managers is less different from the timehonoured patterns than one would suppose. The main changes in business during this century are in scale, complexity, and technical skill. This is repeating what has been written earlier in this book, but must be reiterated in the context of training. The traditional theme in the evolution of an enterprise has been the family firm with a limited number of employees and operating relatively simple processes, in a world of laissez faire. Managers received an admirable if unconscious training which started the day they were born. interior Planning