Abstract
‘Fancy this Englishman coming a thousand miles to study your fascist methods, Dad,’ observed the son of a German manager in whose company one of the present writers spent a few days (the father quoted this remark with evident satisfaction). This manager did indeed lay on a good performance including draconian inspections of the works, confrontation with other management colleagues, savage cost cutting measures, and illicit (counter to group policy) secondhand equipment deals on the side. The morning which began with his telling the marketing director, much his senior, ‘now I’ve seen how you go about things I understand why this company is threatened with short-time working’, ended on the factory roof investigating a presumed structural fault while Boeing 737s passed some fifty feet above as they angled in to land at Munich airport. In the evening we relaxed at a reunion meeting of his student duelling society!
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Notes
For a general characterisation of German management see Peter Lawrence, Managers and Management in West Germany, Croom Helm, London, 1980.
For an introductory account of company structure supported with a series of real organisation charts see Peter Lawrence and Robert Lee, Insight into Management, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984, second edition 1989.
For a sense of the trend towards more professional purchasing and independent purchasing departments see B. Farrington and M. Wood-mansey, The Purchasing Function, Management Survey Report No. 50, British Institute of Management, London, 1980.
For this titillating account of power plays and infighting in a French cigarette factory see Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, Tavistock Publications, London, 1964.
This first study of the work of 160 managers is discussed in Rosemary Stewart, Managers and their Jobs, Pan, London, 1964.
This very clever analysis of areas of choice in management jobs is Rosemary Stewart, Choices for the Manager, McGraw-Hill, Maidenhead, 1982.
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© 1990 Jean-Louis Barsoux and Peter Lawrence
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Barsoux, JL., Lawrence, P. (1990). The Chequerboard of Roles. In: The Challenge of British Management. Economics Today. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21047-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21047-3_2
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