British Business Education Comes of Age
| Date | 01 September 1981 |
| Published date | 01 September 1981 |
| Pages | 14-16 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb057211 |
| Author | Bob Crew |
| Subject Matter | Economics,Information & knowledge management,Management science & operations |
British Business Education
Comes of Age
by Bob Crew
The state of the art in business education and manage-
ment training in the UK has come a long way since the
birth of American-style business schools on our shores
in the early 1960s and, with the completion of more than
100 management training courses by Britain's oldest
business school this year, business education in Britain
can be said to have come of age.
Today, British schools are more than a match for
their American counterparts, and there is no longer any
need therefore for companies to send their executives all
the way to the US to acquire extra know-how and train-
ing, because there is nothing in the American cur-
riculum that is not as well established and taught in Bri-
tain. On the contrary, the trend has been so radically
reversed by British schools over the last 20 years that it
is the British who are now in the surprising position of
being able to teach the Americans a thing or two about
management training, and to offer subjects and methods
not commonly available in the US - such as exercises in
company-to-government negotiations world-wide and in
industrial relations (involving trade union lecturers,
managers and workers in the same classroom), both of
which are areas where the Americans have little experi-
ence.
Another British invention - which is not practised in
America - is "action learning", whereby an executive
incorporates a company problem from the workplace in
his Master's Degree course as a qualifying part of his
studies at business school. Instead of learning from
case-study examples of other people's problems - as
they still do in the US - he learns from and solves his
own problems.
Business education and management training in Bri-
tain has been pioneered by one school more than any
other, long before the term "business school" came into
popular parlance, and the British got the mistaken
impression that business education was an exclusively
American idea. That school - which holds the record
among British and European schools for having com-
pleted the greatest number of training courses (over 100)
and can claim to be the oldest in Western Europe - is
the Henley, The Management College, at Henley-on-
Thames in Oxfordshire, which was founded at a time
when there were few teachers in management subjects
and hardly any books on the matter, not to mention a
great deal of suspicion about business education on this
side of the Atlantic about the daring - some said ludicr-
ous - suggestion that the performance of managers
could be improved by training and business education.
Henley, founded in 1946, started off teaching general
managers and administrators in business and industry,
civil servants, ambassadors and administrators in the
armed forces. Today, it has graduated, as it were, to
chief executives, company chairmen, lawyers and
accountants, bankers, financial directors, engineers and
marketing directors.
In a late 1940s-early 1950s environment that was at
best wary, and at worst hostile, Henley pioneered the
"syndicate method" of learning - another world (and
British) "first", that has taken over from the American
"case study" tradition of teaching - whereby formal
lectures are avoided like the plague most of the time,
and students are encouraged by "group advisers" to
manage their own studies independently and informally,
in syndicates of executives and tutors, learning from
each other, in open forum and competing with other
syndicates on the same course. While Harvard pushed
ahead with formal and rigid lectures, based on case
studies, Henley regarded that as passe, and developed
its own peculiarly British brand of syndicate learning,
which was felt to be more relevant to the practical
requirements of business and industry, and is today in
demand throughout the world - at any of the numerous
staff colleges abroad modelled on Henley and among the
many foreign executives per annum who come to Hen-
ley for their management training.
Few of Henley's staff came from traditional academic
backgrounds, and many were recruited or seconded
from industry. In this way Henley became the seed-bed
of developments in business education in this country
and abroad, taking great pride in freeing itself from
established dogma and being better able, as a result, to
meet the more practical needs of industry and com-
merce and the often highly individual needs of execu-
tives from starkly differing backgrounds who pass
through its charming and elegant riverside portals,
quietly tucked away in one of the most picturesque
reaches of the Thames Valley.
14 INDUSTRIAL MANAGEMENT + DATA SYSTEMS
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