ABSTRACT
Russian enterprises are currently facing challenges for which their training in the skills and systems associated with a planned economy will have ill-prepared them. Where prices were formally set centrally, they are now set by enterprises; where firms had a high degree of vertical integration, they may become increasingly segmented, and where labour was previously cheap and relations paternalistic, there are now pressures for large-scale rationalisation and redundancies. Such trends have their roots in the initial reform programme initiated by Gorbachev between 1986 and 1990 [1]. The management skills and traditions of the former USSR are not however wholly obsolete. The management theory of the centrally-planned system was, according to some observers, more sophisticated than is sometimes realised [2], Similarly, the practical difficulties engendered by the system provided substantial challenges for an increasingly resourceful management elite [3]. However, the gradual erosion of the centrally-planned system after the passing of the Law on State Enterprises of 1987, and its wholesale abandonment since 1991, has created a need for the establishment of a whole new training infrastructure. Soviet managers are faced with ‘a problem of mind-set, a continued failure to break with the priorities of the past’ [4].
