How Helpful Is Industry's New Fad?

TIME was when a new rug on the floor or a bigger office was the infallible sign of a rising executive. Today the management comer is more apt to find himself sent back to school with a pack of pencils and instructions to sharpen his potential. The new corporate fad--or what one executive calls "a fever sweeping industry"--was started to combat the shortage of executives by trying to force-feed talent in the classroom instead of waiting for it to grow naturally in the office. In 1957 alone, industry sent an estimated 300,000 executives back to school in hopes that they would learn to be better bosses. The phenomenal increase in corporate collegians has sparked a high-level, academic argument: Just how much good are such training courses?

Industry's rush to answer the school bell's call has taken two main channels: company-run or management institute schools that are often as large as small colleges, and special programs at universities and colleges to improve executive minds in more academic surroundings, perhaps the most famous company college is General Electric's two-year-old advanced management course, which is given at a $2,000,000 center at Crotonville, N-Y., 35 miles from Manhattan. There top executives from every G.E. division live together for 13 weeks, attending classes and eating their meals together, sleeping in a fancy dormitory. In a four-part course they study G.E.'s managerial philosophy and the company's plans for the future, hear lectures on geopolitics, population pressures and economics, finally work on individual projects in which they produce thesislike reports, e.g., "Organization Structure Problems and the Operating Components Incident to Decentralization of Management." About half of G.E.'s permanent faculty are executives; like more and more companies, G.E. brings the rest in from college faculties. Each year G.E. puts 320 men through its course --at a cost of roughly $2,500 each.

Dozens of other companies have similar programs, including such corporate giants as General Motors, IBM, International Harvester, Alcoa, U.S. Steel and Ford Motor Co. American Telephone & Telegraph Co. has put 1,800 executives through its four-year-old management training center in Asbury Park, N.J., offers additional training for thousands of executives among its far-flung subsidiaries. Most companies see to it that their executives get courses closely related to business, but a few have bravely plunged into more cultural territory. Bayuk Cigars Inc. (Phillies, Websters) gives its executives courses in anthropology and art, is planning-to add a course in music appreciation.

For companies that are too small to maintain their own training programs, at least 23 management-training associations are waiting to take executives in tow. The biggest and oldest of these, the American Management Association, has blossomed from only twelve conferences in 1949 to 1,200 courses, seminars and conferences this year. This fall it opened a $2,000,000 Academy of Advanced Management at Saranac Lake, N.Y., also offers courses at Manhattan's Sheraton-Astor Hotel and in nine other cities. Its programs are broadly divided into studies of basic-management principles, organization-building, planning and controlling, and appraisal of operational performance. They include a deadly earnest game in which five teams of executives battle to win shares of a mythical common market. Like an adult Monopoly, the game allows each team a certain amount of money, gives each team a chance to increase its take by making decisions on such problems as advertising, promotion, distribution, etc., scores performances with an electronic computer. Cost for the two-week course: $960. Last year A.M.A. put 80,000 executives through their paces, even gave full-course graduates an embossed diploma.

The first to spark a widely successful management course was Harvard Business School, which set up an advanced program for the Government in World War II to train executives in new production techniques. Out of that early course grew Harvard's famous "case-method" system for business, in which executives grapple with actual problems drawn from the business world. Today Harvard offers a solid fare of executive courses, and many other universities have followed its lead with top management programs, notably M.I.T., Columbia, Stanford, Michigan State, and Rutgers. For his excursion into the halls of ivy, the corporate Big Man on Campus costs his firm anywhere from $25 for a week-long conference to $3,000 for a full academic year of residence on campus--plus his regular salary.

One of the big arguments about executive training is where it should take place. Many corporations argue that a university or management training institute is the best place because it gives the executive a chance to gain a broader perspective by throwing him together with men from many and varied fields (both the Bank of America and Forest Lawn cemetery send their executives to California colleges). Says Dr. Joseph Trickett, professor of management at the University of Santa Clara, and onetime executive: "When you take a man whose work has made him provincial and send him off to Harvard, he sees other men from the entire country with the same problems he faces. It makes him read more, think more, be more savvy."

Others feel just as strongly that an executive is better off in a company school, where he can learn more lessons immediately valuable to his firm. They insist that picking out a few men to go off to school while the others mind the store is bad for morale. Burroughs Corp. prefers to teach executives in its own way rather than have them go off to school and pick up ideas that might not fit into the company's scheme. Furthermore, since executive training has become so popular, some companies feel that many colleges have set up inferior courses just to get on the bandwagon. And many rightly fear that their bright young men will be lured away by corporate talent scouts lurking in the university halls.

One big factor that worries many firms is the effect the return to campus may have on the middle-aged man (average age of the executive student: 40) accustomed to giving orders. Henry W. Hopwood, assistant public-relations director at Republic Steel Corp., found that his executive study days at Harvard helped him tremendously in his job, but he points out that some men run into trouble on campus: "For Mr. Big, pulling up stakes and becoming a college boy again was an experience to which some men couldn't adjust. There were lots of little complaints--false heart attacks, failing appetite--things like that. The night before we went home, all hell broke loose, and men 40 and 50 years old marched through the dorms yelling, singing, beating pans." Says Clarence A. Dauber, engineering director of Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., who attended Columbia's course last summer at a mountain-top campus 50 miles north of New York City: "The strain gets progressively worse as weeks go on. About the second or third week men are hanging around bars and nightclubs more and more. It's a reaction against being confined and being told every hour what to do."

Every school, says Robert R. Tufts, director of Case Institute of Technology's management-training course, "has a center sag problem. It occurs about midway in the course, and students become frustrated and go into grousing sessions." To help relieve the shock of change, Case and several other schools, e.g., Harvard and Southern Methodist, now provide brief side courses for "management widows," in which wives get a fill-in on their husbands' studies so they will be able to talk over problems with them.

Despite the time, money and effort that go into formal management training, some companies consider the whole thing a monumental waste of time. They feel, like Douglas Aircraft, that without any help from training schools, "the cream will come to the top and the skimmed milk will stay at the bottom." The management-training-school graduate, they point out, often faces a flock of frustrations on his return to work. "Lots of men feel that being sent to college is like being told they're going to be vice president," says one executive. "When it doesn't happen to them, they're disappointed." Others sulk if management does not readily accept their new ideas. Moreover, some companies suspect that the popularity of executive training, especially at universities, does not grow from corporate need at all, but is merely a long-delayed reaction to the idea that the average businessman is just an uncultured boob.

Perhaps the biggest objection to the whole idea of executive training courses is that U.S. industry, which spends millions checking on the efficiency of everything else it does, has no check on the results of executive training. More important, it has not even been able to figure out a way to do so effectively. The biggest reason for this failure is that, as Ralph M. Besse, executive vice president of Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., puts it, "Those picked to attend classes have already demonstrated ability to move, so you can't say their class work was the specific cause of any advancement." When asked point-blank what they got out of such courses, the executive students themselves seem surprised by the question and are often at a loss for an answer. They mumble such replies as, "Well, it wasn't a waste of time" or "I guess it did some good." Even those who are most enthusiastic about the courses describe the benefits they got as "intangible" rather than anything that could specifically help them in business. Says a Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. official: "You have to have faith that they do some good, that's all--absolute faith."

In the long run, most companies agree that executives cannot be produced in the classroom. They accept the fact that the natural qualities that make a good executive usually come to the fore whether or not a man is exposed to formal training. What they hope to accomplish by switching their men for a time from the executive suite to the classroom is to sharpen their talents with broadening work for which there is little time in the busy world of business. Says Jerry Basseler, director of Continental Oil's Personnel Development: "We simply think of additional education as an opportunity the company affords a man. If anything comes of it, that's fine. But the proof of the pudding still rests with the man."

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