Management Training In Europe.

The article discusses the difficulties in teaching a group of European middle managers. These difficulties can best be described as a failure "to get through" to them. Nearly all North American middle managers have had some exposure to a wide range of business ideas and techniques throughout their educational experience, both institutional and on-the-job. By and large, European universities have neither been interested in nor active in education for business management. The European professor tends to be far more interested in the development of logical structures, in classifying observations and phenomena, in working toward general syntheses. When a European university student actually enters a company, he is still, in a great many instances, denied the opportunity of acquiring the broad knowledge of business institutions, procedures, and objectives characteristically acquired by North American middle managers. Most American businessmen accept implicitly the desirability of business growth. However, European students mostly emphasizes on considering risk factors. There is less incentive for him to strive for growth, especially when such striving involves risk--risk to one's personal wealth rather than to the wealth of virtually faceless shareholders.