ABSTRACT
Since operating experience and performance are likely to unfit a man for top management, it would seem logical to try to obtain top-management candidates from elsewhere. Men who have had very little or no operating experience, who have actually never worked in the enterprise proper, but who have spent most of their working life in the central office as assistants on policy decisions, are increasingly preferred in the promotion to top-management rank. There is no escaping the need for a policy that will make operating men capable of succeeding to the top-management positions. The job of selecting successors is considered a foremost responsibility of the head of the ministry, who is usually not a technician or a former operating man but a Party politician. The neglect of the job of supplying adequately trained and tested successors has been a constant and loud complaint since the beginning of Russia's industrialization.
