ABSTRACT
Managers have called for an adaptive approach to management. In other words, they have highlighted the necessity of managing within a changing environment. Ironically, while this clarion call has often been sounded, the substance of business and management theory has hardly changed over the last 30 years. Money and finance have never been very far apart. Money, though, is actually an abstraction. People who are instinctively adept at making it start out with a primal desire to achieve, to acquire and to possess, rather than a wish to analyse a balance sheet or profit and loss account. Analytically based financial management is in fact a rational progression from out of the ‘primal’ depths. While business is generally identified with money and finance, its origins lie closer to marketing. For Harry Turner the ‘modern marketeer’ is an analyst of the 1950s and 1960s rather than an adaptive manager of the 1980s and 1990s.
