ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the logic that dictated a productivity focus, and then looks at how the government responded to the challenge of stimulating intensive growth in the period to the end of 1943. It summarises a debate that emerged fully over the following year, concerning the future of industrial management. However, from mid-1942, the drive for productivity was very much transformed, in both scale and content. The watchword of efficiency now became accepted as of great importance in most production departments. The Board of Trade first began to examine the management question during the summer and autumn of 1943, as a response to growing government interest in a wide range of reconstruction problems. The Weir report on industrial management was forwarded to the President, Hugh Dalton, on 23 February 1944. It began from the premise that management was a crucially important function which had all too often been inadequately developed.
