Public Advices to Management Educators: 1960/1980

It is a familiar enough concept in the teaching of management that the business organisation is an open system, operating in an environment susceptible of analysis. The same logic can be applied to the business schools which thus teach. I accordingly have attempted to review in this article what have seemed to be the most critical pieces of public or environmental advices coming our way. Members of the advising environmental community have ranged from the National Economic Development Council and Lord Franks in the early sixties to Nancy Foy and the European Foundation for Management and Development in the late seventies. In between there have been a million suggestions by users, be they company management development advisers or programme participants. Finally, of course, there have been competitive activities by schools other than the one in which we find ourselves. They do not offer verbal advice; rather they demonstrate, should we care to observe carefully, how goals similar if not always identical to our own might be achieved. Accordingly, this discussion will not examine what we have done at Cranfield but only what I believe we can perceive other schools doing elsewhere.