The Biography of a Student of Management

Speaker A As a young man. I'd spent about six years in industry, in Coal board and in furniture manufacture, and got interested in this then very new and exciting subject, management. I tried reading what was available, which wasn't much, and I wasn't guided and I was not at all impressed. Indeed, before coming to Glacier Metal, I made my own attempt to lay down a sort of logical basis for management which the coal board liked, and got published in a very limited way, but that's of no interest now whatsoever. I saw an opportunity to go to Glacier Metal as an internal consultant. The job looked very exciting. I started reading the Glacier literature. I started with exploration in management, actually. The Wilfred Brown book. And this was like St. Paul on the Road to Damascus. This was really good stuff, it was intellectually tough, it was based in practice. So I went to Glacier and very enthusiastically learnt all I could about the project as it then was. And after a couple of years, seeing that this was my main interest, I was moved as a staff member to the Glass Institute of Management, which was then a few years old, not terribly old, and the current director was somebody called Derek Newman. After about 18 months there, having the urge to write in my fingers all the time, I started writing up the approach as we were retaining it at Glacier Institute of Management to visiting courses of managers from industry, commerce, the public services. Actually, Elliot Jacks wasn't at all happy about this and I had a very edgy interview with him at one time. It was brought out not only in my name, the book, but organisation analysis, that is, but carried as well the name of my boss, Derek Newman, quite legitimately, not that he'd written any of it, but that he'd certainly shaped the particular brand of thinking. Then I had a brief spell in industry as a company planner and this wasn't where I wanted to be. And I realized that where I wanted to be was working with Elliot Jacks in university and fortunately there was a job based in Brunel working in the hospital service and I was set having that job. At that time there were perhaps a dozen people in BIOS, nearly all of whom were working on Jaxian lines, though later on there were people who joined BIOS who were not oriented to Jaxian ideas. By the way, I used Jaxian, of course, as a shorthand for Jackson Brown to save using best names all the time. I liked it very much. This was very exciting. I was put in charge of a sub project. Then some more money arose to do similar work in local authority social services departments, social welfare work, which is very extensive, or now in Britain, and was at that time still. So I became director of that unit, but retained a foot in the health services unit, so that all my time at Brunel I was working mainly in those two fields local government, social welfare and the nationalized hospital service, which of course was a vast undertaking in Britain. I also did some work in a little work in commerce and some work in voluntary organizations. The work was social analytic at first. For some reason Elliot didn't tell us that we should be working social analytically. And it was very much more conventional research going in and saying please, can I get some information from you? But increasingly as time went on we went back to the Jackson approaches. Do you have problems? If so, I may be able to help you. Then that's where the analysis comes in. And of course, no directions or even recommendations to the client. Merely an exposure of the basics of the situation and the alternatives. Later I was interested enough to write up a whole book on that on my own social analysis. Jax there was time later oh, I became a professorial fellow and in effect number two to Elliot. And when he took here Sabbatical in the States I acted as acting director for a year.