Training for Industrial Management

Abstract

IN a report entitled “Three Years' Experience and Results in the Training of Scientific Men for Industrial Management” (57 Gordon Square, London, W.C.I), Mr. W. R. Dunlop describes the work which he has carried out in providing facilities for training in this subject on the lines of personal and individual tuition, and more recently by correspondence. The courses, he explains, were not undertaken in the expectation of obtaining spectacular results; but experience has shown that scientific and technical men are definitely interested, and that those who have taken full advantage of the training have derived substantial benefit in one way or another. A difficulty has been to get something out of the students as well as putting something in. It has been hard to make chemists in particular understand that management is not a subject but an activity, and that action, energy and initiative as well as passive absorption of knowledge must be demonstrated in a course of training. Chemists in some cases appear to suffer from an ‘inferiority complex’ in regard to expressing opinions on matters outside their immediate province, while on the other hand many engineers, especially mechanical engineers, tend to go to the other extreme.