Leaves from a management gamebook
BUSINESS VIEWPOINT PETER BROOKE
Peter Brooke is managing director of Spencer Stuart and Associates, management consultants specialising in executive search.
That metaphysical assembly of economic con- jurers, the Committee for Invisible Trans- actions, has done its work so well over the years that the Board of Trade has even in- cluded those very visible imports, the executive search consultants, in its latest admirable inquiry into the effect of foreign investment in Britain. Its questions have been understandably statistical, and these random observations by a pioneer from the original executive search safari of the early 1960s are a remedial re- sponse to some of the questions which the Board of Trade did not ask. Now that all the excitement of ensuring the survival of executive search in Britain is long since past, they may seem to emanate from a swivel-chair critic, but at least the swivel-chair has been reasonably well sited.
There is some danger of writing upon management achieving a repetitive impenetra- bility—impenetrability, it will be recalled, was a favourite word of Humpty-Duh*ty. Cocco- thraustes coccothraustes coccothraustes is to the ornithologist as the hawfinch to the man in the street. (Too many writers on manage- ment fall into that category of which Lady Constance Lytton said, in a book review, 'for parody, read again.') But, if the remarks appear American, it must be put down to the brand of swivel-chair. The hand that writes them is firmly cisatlantic, guided by a heart incidentally proud that Buckingham Palace had a bath- room more than a decade before the White House.
Our firm is an American one. We have thus had vivid opportunity these last seven years to compare management styles and resources on both sides of the Atlantic. This is true about clients in similar activities but of different national parentage and also of American sub- sidiaries in the UK. One of the relevant keys to the latter, assuming sufficient sophistication in the American executive to have overcome im- mediate culture-shock, is the precise frustration which an American may feel, whether he is here or there. Finally, we have had direct ex- perience of introducing American general managers into British companies here (and vice versa, with Englishmen moving into chief executive positions in domestic companies in the States), whose reactions are peculiarly apt to this issue.
In 1802, Bagehot observed, every hereditary monarch in Europe was insane. All generalisa- tions provoke exceptions, but there is one difference between the industrial management of our two countries that impresses us most deeply, and it comes down not to analysis but to action. In making the key decisions, at least at the head of great businesses, top manage- ment in the UK often compares more than adequately with their American counterparts. It is arguable that, in concentrating on essen- tials, a very senior British executive may be prompter and more incisive: as yet, there is less of Humpty-Dumpty's impenetrability t". through which to cut. But, once the decision has been taken, the American trianagemeht team generally leaves its British opposite num- ber standing. The sheer quantity of qualified second- and third-line management in the us ensures that a decision taken is rapidly trans- formed into action and achievement. By conk trast, a British senior management team may find itself inappropriately involved in the de- tailed implementation of the decision (thus hideously overworking its key people) or alternatively refines the decision indefinitely in order to compensate, either for the shortage of effective middle management or for sheer lack of willpower, by the perfection of the objective. It's nice to be always right. Against this, 'Lincoln wanted to have God on his side, but he had to have Kentucky.'
To say this is neither revelation nor novelty. But, symptomatically, one wonders sometimes if the country has ever really moved beyond diagnosing the ill. The creation of the Savoy Group, whose meetings culminated in the dinner presided over by Lord Rootes, in the Franks inquiry, and in the setting up of the London and Manchester Business Schools, was prompted by an acute realisation of the shortage of professional management, specifically in the engineering industry. The speed and the relative success of the two business schools (and others) are greatly encouraging. But the dimensions of the problem, in terms of num- bers, are greater than these schools can begin to satisfy. Moreover, there is a profound need for huge numbers of managers without neces- sarily the full academic development that a business school graduate should possess but with a series of fundamental and integrated basic competences. Everyone has his panacea for our ills, but it is no part of this article to try to provide one. Our experience, how- ever, insists that we ask this question—what measures can be taken, short term and long term, to expand our managerially qualified re- sources to meet this middle-management gap?
Like any other transplant, an executive search firm has to work effectively for the good of its environment if it is to avoid rejection. A sense of responsibility never fed anyone, but it makes one's daily bread more palatable. Thus we have had to ask ourselves what particular contribution a firm of our kind can make to this situation. There is an acutely logical one —to work closely with clients in the direct de- velopment of the human resources that they already possess—which we follow, since it is so natural a corollary to introducing strength from outside, but we have been too preoccu- pied to use the specific characteristics of execu- tive Search in the same endeavour.
Executive search is characteristically em- ployed against problems where there are by definition a limited number of candidates but where equally a good solution is mandatory. It has an obvious relevance in a market where skills are in short supply, but, just as obviously, it could be exploited irresponsibly in such cir- cumstances. It has been a particular delight that so many of our clients have asked us to help, not in simply filling gaps, but in bringing new strength to particular situations, especially by innovation. This applies in functional tech- niques, in attitudes—we enjoy the irony of British clients requesting experience in Ameri- can subsidiaries among candidates—but yet more strongly in industrial fields where com- petition is still modest.
Broadly speaking, competition is strongest in those fields which are most prone to wide- spread local manufacture by international com- petitors. Pharmaceuticals, food, cars, elec- tronics, chemicals and advertising are all examples. Many other industries, where inter- ' national competition is either at arm's length across frontiers or ruled out altogether by trans- portation costs, are markedly less competitive —in the States as well as here. There are in- dustries where a single aggressive company seeking talent and ability from outside their industry have a dramatic opportunity not only to enrich themselves but also to claim the coun- try's gratitude, since this act of itself will bring new forces of competition into the industry, to the whole industry's good. But the present aura of the industry may discourage a really able man from entering it, unless he is shown (by firms like ourselves) good ground for ignoring its image and imagining instead its potential.
One of the greatest benefits that could flow from the Board of Trade's present inquiry would be if it helped to determine the priorities of reverse investment by Britain abroad. We were a tiny firm, even in the States, when we established our bridgehead here seven years ago—eight men spread over five offices, in the us, on the Continent and in Latin America. It could not require much research by the ux recruiting industry to keep track of our progress, nor to know that in this field the United States is the richest market in the world. We find it incredible that the nation that singed • the King of Spain's beard can boast no more than a single belated and subsidised venture in the us market for executive recruiting.
When I was at the Harvard Business School, I kept a commonplace book. I began it upon St George's Day, and its opening entry was thus from an English poet. But its second was American, from a letter of John Paul Jones: 'The rules of conduct, the maxims of action, and the tactical instincts that serve to gain small victories may always be expanded into the winning of great ones with suitable oppor- tunity; because in human affairs the sources of success are ever to be found in the foun- tains of quick resolve and swift stroke; and it seems to be a law inflexible and inexor- One suspects that John Paul Jones would con- sider himself justified by the likely returns in the Board of Trade's inquiry, but one is sad that no English executive recruiting firm has plunged into that deep end of the Spanish Main which the American market represents. It was not ever so.
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