ABSTRACT
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, many American technical assistance personnel who crossed the Atlantic were shocked at the poor quality of British management. Fairly typically, a team that visited Lancashire in 1951 concluded that the cotton industry’s managers were mostly ‘dominated by… inertia’.1 As the Americans saw it, the obvious solution to this problem was the introduction of reforms that would make the British manager more professional. The need, they argued, was for a greater degree of training. Britain must follow the American example and teach its managers how to perform. The following chapter describes what happened when the US missionaries tried to implement their prescriptions. It deals with both the push for management education and the history of the British Institute of Management (BIM), since this latter organisation was believed to be crucial in establishing professional values.
