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by the score,heavily in-boxed and lettered show enterprises large and small, to be counted, pleading with the younger generation to come forward and be paid handsomely for being trained in management.Managers,clearly are made, not born!

Throughout the year, conferences provide the continuous platform for the incessant crusade for more and better management. A national management institute can count its members in tens of thousands. The Universities can claim a large volume of their annual output poured into management careers; serious business leaders can recurrently discuss among themselves the ways and means of raising management standards. All this in the setting of an age when nuclear power, space-satellites and radiation technology are the characteristic features of progress. Truly an era of "managerial revolution", when the harvesting of the fruits of technical achievement is vitally dependent on the skills of management - whatever these happen to be.

Those last few words are more important than a passing quip,for they point to one of the major weaknesses in the contemporary scene.There has indeed been substantial advancement in management practice,and a vast extension in the range,scope and depth of management studies;yet,curiously,there seems to be still no accepted understanding of the nature of the management role or of the skill it entails - no authorized version,as it were, of management principles or of the essential themes in the gospel that is preached. This is not to imply that the nature of management is not of itself understood: On the contrary, a clear analysis has been available as long as the earlier edition of the present volume, and before.

There is, however, no accepted, universally adopted definition in the sense in which the scientist knows that all his confreres accept the one meaning for the one particular term.Not that this matters seriously; the differences are superficial rather than substantial, and in the event most managers appear to be doing much the same things in practice,whatever their theoretical understanding of their role. The drawback in this situation lies in the obstacles it creates to the advancement of knowledge and the pursuit of systematic studies.

Where every man can claim to be his own authority,orderly cognitive argument is difficult;and management is now in the stage of development when it can benefit materially from the analytical review of experience and constructive interchange of rationally based

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