MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT AND DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT
| Pages | 30-43 |
| Date | 01 January 1971 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb055192 |
| Published date | 01 January 1971 |
| Author | John Morris |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
PERSONNEL REVIEW
MANAGEMENT
DEVELOPMENT AND
DEVELOPMENT
MANAGEMENT
John Morris
THE ARGUMENT STATED
What is likely to happen to management development
in the seventies? I believe that it will become closely
linked with a newly evolving branch of management—
development management. Development management is
concerned with building new forms of organisation that
will enable the enterprise to cope effectively with change.
This contrasts with operations management, which is
concerned with the efficient use of existing resources to
make the goods and services currently required, and
with the rapid restoration of a steady state whenever a
breakdown occurs. In some enterprises, it is possible to
relate the two aspects of management very closely in
day-to-day working. In others, the two need to be
sharply separated if they are to be mutually effective.
In either case, the co-ordination of operations and
development is a vital function of general management.
With the growth of development management, general
management will need more careful study, as its tasks
will become more complex and demanding,
Development management is not merely planning,
though planning is often an important part of develop-
ment. It is also the establishment of new procedures,
the development of new abilities and skills among the
people working in the enterprise, the initiation of new
product lines, the creation or selection of new markets.
Development management is not just the manipulation
of numbers, but is the creative analogue of operations
management. Without operations management, develop-
ment management has lost its ultimate reason for exist-
ence.
But without development management, operations
management is fatally inclined to run down into smooth
routines, which have lost the ability to question them-
selves. British management has had long experience of
handling steady states and breakdowns, in the opera-
tional areas of the enterprise. But it has encountered
many difficulties in development, especially rapid and
imaginative development. The fostering of effective
development management, then, is one of the main tasks
of management development.
Much of present-day management development is very
different from this. It is a patchwork quilt of appraisal
schemes, succession plans, a little career planning, and
a lot of training courses, internal and external. Argu-
ments rage about the best ways of conducting manage-
ment development. Should it take place mainly "on the
job"
or "off the job"? Opinion moves slowly towards
"on the job." Should managers have professional quali-
fications for their work, like doctors, architects and
engineers? Can an overall system, like "management by
objectives," be an effective way of developing manage-
ment? Few enterprises seem to have moved beyond
these arguments to envisaging a powerful role for the
systematic development of their managerial effective-
ness.
There are, of course, many instances of well-
established routine procedures for "auditing" managerial
strengths and weaknesses, for establishing training
activities, and for getting rough estimates of the future
number of managers required at various future dates,
if current trends are maintained. But, by their very
nature, these routines take a good deal for granted,
particularly the broad shape of the enterprise. They
allow for expansion and contraction, but not diversifica-
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