Management Decision

Managers in the year 2000 and after: a strategy for development

David Weir Clive Smallman
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 Managers in the year 2000 and after: a strategy for
development
The paper considers the need
for an evolution in managerial
skills in the twenty-first
century, and considers the
required change in the nature
of business schools and
management development.
Considering the history of
management development in
Downloaded by Western Sydney U At 21:36 14 October 2015 (PT)
the UK and overseas, the
paper uses the case study of
the Bradford Management
Centre in developing strate-
gies to meet this challenge.
Management Decision
36/1 [1998] 43–51
© David T.H. Weir and
Clive Smallman
[ISSN 0025-1747]
David Weir
Director and Professor of Management, University of Bradford, Management
Centre, Bradford, UK
Clive Smallman
Lecturer in Business Process Management, University of Bradford, Management
Centre, Bradford, UK
Introduction: the millennium
manager
Forty years ago the eminent philosopher, the
late Sir Isaiah Berlin, distinguished two types
of knowledge. Each was identified with a
particular animal, the hedgehog and fox
respectively. “The fox”, wrote Berlin, “can do
many things, the hedgehog knows only one
thing, but he knows that very well”. Perhaps
the same distinction can be applied to the
trends in the evolution of management.
The paradigms of management with which
most managers have grown up have been
hedgehog paradigms. The big corporations
have wanted managers to do one thing, to
manifest one sort of behaviour, to identify
with one type of culture, and to pursue single-
mindedly a career within the boundaries of
the corporate organisation. In the 1950s, W.H.
White, alarmed by the spread of corporate
uniformity, coined the phrase “the organisa-
tion man”, and seemed to typify a whole gen-
eration of middle managers.
Management development, which first
emerged in the 1960s, was transmuted into
organisation development. The individual
career aspirations of serious professional
managers came to be, if not coterminous, at
least parallel, even synonymous with the
goals of the organisation. So organisation
development in which whole parts of the
corporate edifice participated became the
main vehicle of learning and change. Man-
agement education, which had started in its
modern sense in the USA in the early years
of the twentieth century and had been based
on the flagship Master of Business Adminis-
tration (MBA) programmes, has in the past
30 years also become incorporated into
larger structures. Business school profes-
sors, talking of their wares, speak of the
three-way contract between the individual,
the employing organisation and the institu-
tion of higher learning. The whole corporate
endeavour has been a hedgehog enterprise.
Businesses have looked for overlap, for con-
sistency and for mutual support for learning.
The individual aspiration to achieve has
been channelled into the fulfilment of the
corporate mission.
So far so good, then. But is this going to be
enough in the twenty-first century? Are there
new challenges to which new responses are
required? Will tomorrow’s managers be able
to coast through their professional career on
the basis of the learning undertaken in the
first half of their career? Will there be such
creatures as corporate managers in a hun-
dred years’ time? What is the future actually
going to be like?
Educated guesses are about the best
answers that can be made to these questions,
but the implausibility of this exercise is
demonstrated by the last question, since the
future, by definition, is something that is
unknown. That said it is possible to guess, yet
perhaps such answers are not especially
reassuring.
The future is certainly unlikely to be any
easier than the present. Commonplace in the
more excitable writings on management that
emanate from North America is the argu-
ment that “we live in a period of greater
change than any we have hitherto known”. In
terms of some indicators this is undoubtedly
correct. But in terms of the political stability
and organisational solidity in which hedge-
hog thinking flourishes, the past 30 years look
about as stable as anything known for a long
time. Yet, cracks have started to appear in the
structure.
Organisations themselves are changing
their nature. On a worldwide scale, the vast
increase in literacy, the radical improvement
in information and communication tech-
nologies, the shrinking of the world in time
and distance terms, and the break-up of the
large military and industrial blocs have
signalled what some commentators have
called “the end of hierarchy”. The organisa-
tion of the future will be, it is said, modelled
on the loosely coupled network rather than
the imperatively co-ordinated association.
The knowledge base which underpins the
power and skill base of the competent profes-
sional functional manager becomes less
significant than the capacity to adapt, the
flexibility and open-mindedness based on a
close understanding of the needs of the
changing business which offers opportunity
to the entrepreneur. Open-mindedness,
enjoyment of success, the capacity to work in
[ 43 ]
 David Weir and Clive Smallman
Managers in the year 2000
and after: a strategy for
development
Management Decision
36/1 [1998] 43–51
Downloaded by Western Sydney U At 21:36 14 October 2015 (PT)
[ 44 ]
small flexible teams, the consistent high
activity and awareness of learning opportu-
nities will provide the basis of the career of
the new manager. Perhaps career itself will
come to be a misnomer as people come to
terms not simply with dual career families,
but with intermittent family careers in
which the interrelations between individual,
family and corporate roles become the prod-
ucts of individual choices rather than of
societal regulation.
Of course someone will need to be home
minding the store, that is if there are going to
be stores. Retailing perhaps provides one of
the clearer models of what the manager’s role
may be in the twenty-first century. What used
to be core management functions of control,
information management and accounting
can all be undertaken by systems hardwired
into physical structures. The people will
move intermittently in and out of the lower
levels of the organisation but without ever
attaining an entrée even to the first rung of
management. Typically those junior manage-
ment positions were to do with managing
junior people. But the organisation will not
employ people like that at all. Long gone is
the fantasy of the “factory in the dark” in
which assembly of manufactured goods was
to be undertaken by robots who, by definition,
would not need the light on. However, the “no
career hierarchy” retail organisation is very
much alive (and kicking!). Aspirants who
enter at the bottom cannot work their way up,
because many of the old rungs of the ladder
have simply disappeared.
But will managers be specialists at all then?
Almost certainly yes. However, they will not
necessarily see general management as their
specialism. Textile people will probably
remain textile people, dairy people will
remain dairy people, foundry managers like-
wise. This may be more a matter of experi-
ence, temperament, and where one happens
to be on a particular network than it will be to
do with anything more deep-seated or rooted
in the nature of hierarchical organisations.
The fact is that people know too little about
the future, but enough to suspect that the
techniques of planning and predicting will
still be relevant, if over shorter time hori-
zons. The skills of managing people will
remain the basis of good general manage-
ment and the capacity to keep on adapting
and learning will be fundamental to the
opportunities managers will have to control
their own destinies.
Will all of this mean that it will no longer be
possible to talk in terms of “managing one’s
career” while “keeping one step ahead” and
the like? Not entirely, but it does seem likely
that management in the year 2000 will be a
place for foxes rather than hedgehogs.
There must always be room in management
for the well organised manager, for the values
of order and predictability and the value of
planning and the planning process can never
be under-estimated. Managers must proceed
on the basis that the future, in large measure,
will be more like the present we know than
the future we fear. The realist, brought up on
Murphy’s law, that “if a thing can go wrong it
will”, and comforted, but not too much, by
O’Brien’s modification of Murphy’s law
which reminds us that “Murphy was an opti-
mist” will perhaps find Woody Allen’s words
equally relevant. The comedian once
observed “I am astounded by people who
want to know the universe when it is hard
enough to find your way round Chinatown”.
It is probably the skills of the fox that will
help us pick our way through the Chinatowns
of the future, in Russia as well as in the UK.
Yet, are universities in general, and business
schools in particular, in shape for teaching
these skills?
Strategy for a knowledge business
British education, when delivered to high
quality standards and when it is supported by
a strong interest in the society and culture in
which its programmes are delivered, can
claim to be among the most demanded prod-
ucts in the global market. On the whole the
world likes British products. Hence, British
academics operate from a position of relative
strength and British universities are on bal-
ance still good places in which to work and to
ply the academic trade.
A number of strategic issues face univer-
sity business schools in the global and
national context, and, contrary to received
wisdom, the argument is that university
business schools have more choices than is
generally imagined. They have many more
ways of applying themselves to the problems
of making themselves available for their
traditional markets and more ways of getting
themselves into shape to cope with an uncer-
tain future.
Universities are in the education business.
They cannot normally change their location
with great ease. They are tied into a particu-
lar pattern of staffing which will normally
owe more to the way the map of knowledge
was organised when they were founded than
to how it looks now or how it may look in a
generation’s time. These factors limit their
choices in the short term.
University higher education is something
which on the whole the British do rather well.
 David Weir and Clive Smallman
Managers in the year 2000
and after: a strategy for
development
Management Decision
36/1 [1998] 43–51
Downloaded by Western Sydney U At 21:36 14 October 2015 (PT)
The post-Japan generation in the UK has
grown up with the expectation that the
British are somehow coming from behind,
that the world tends to be ahead of the UK and
that other people in other cultures and soci-
eties somehow do it better. UK business
schools developed fast after the Franks and
Normanbrook reports of the early 1960s that
business schools on the American pattern
were required to help bring British industry
and management up to competitive interna-
tional standards.
One of the authors visited Japan as a mem-
ber of the Finniston Committee in the late
1970s. This committee was set up to consider
the contribution of engineering to manufac-
turing industry in the UK in the light of
national economic needs. From the outset
the committee adopted a comparative per-
spective. They travelled to those foreign
countries from which they believed they had
something to learn. Foremost among them
was, of course, Japan but they also visited
the USA, Sweden, Germany, France, Canada,
Denmark and they learned much from these
visits.
One of the surprising findings from the
visit to Japan was that Japanese secondary
and higher education were not merely
organised on similar lines to that of the UK
but that in each dimension that the commit-
tee could confidently measure they did not
seem to be ahead of the British. They cer-
tainly did not seem to be any more attuned
to the needs of manufacturing industry than
were British universities. Indeed, in many
ways they were more theoretical or more
ivory tower, “more out of touch” than was
the case in the UK. The real difference lay in
what happened to engineers once they
entered industry. In Japan the educational
process did not and does not stop on gradua-
tion. Continuing education is a reality.
Great companies like Sony, Mitsubishi,
Hitachi and Panasonic have the equivalent
of MBA programmes as part of their in-
house management development. More
significantly in Japan in the 1970s this in-
house continuing education was not
restricted to an élite few. The engineering
was better because it went deeper into the
organisation. More ordinary workers in the
Japanese manufacturing system were
attuned to the realities of statistical process
control and other tools of management
which, in the UK, were the provenance only
of a small, technically qualified élite. So
management techniques such as quality
circles and continuous process improve-
ment could be more firmly grounded in the
nature of the organisation. Japanese
manufacturing in the 1970s was based on the
concept of the learning organisation.
Unfortunately, these simple lessons proved
hard for British industrialists to accept.
They wished to believe that the Japanese
had some superior magic, had access to
some arcane elements of culture which were
denied their righteous British counterparts,
that they had somehow or other “fiddled”
the knowledge system. The Japanese virtue
of study, training, hard work, and collective
support for individual behaviours is some-
thing that has taken two generations or
more to start to be accepted in the UK. But
what was not found at any rate was that the
Japanese educational system was somehow
“better and more relevant” in relation to the
requirements of manufacturing industry
than was the case in the UK. But British
business and government did not really
want to hear this either. They ignored the
simple truth that the Japanese had gone
back to several fundamental principles of
industrial and commercial organisation that
had previously formed the very basis of the
British, European and American manufac-
turing advantage in a previous generation.
Hence, it is critical not to make the mistake
of believing that, because British universi-
ties face a relatively more difficult environ-
ment than they have hitherto experienced,
this is because they have done something
wrong or because other people in other soci-
eties are doing the business of university
education better. If industry is not competi-
tive or lacks appropriate skills, that may be
due to things that are out of synch in indus-
try not with failure in the education system.
Industry and business schools need each
other.
University business schools in other soci-
eties, and other cultures, face many similar
problems to those which UK business schools
contend with, but in many ways they are less
well placed than are the British to find
solutions.
So, the prospects for British higher educa-
tion institutions have rarely been better even,
in an increasingly competitive global market.
If the prospects for UK plc are still debatable,
the relative advantages that British universi-
ties enjoy ought to make them more rather
than less confident about the future and their
place in it. The world is becoming increas-
ingly available to the British and to their
systems of education that have made some
choices in the past that other societies are
only now just starting to consider.
The home market is changing too. Govern-
ment is no longer going to cover all of an
individual’s predicted expenditures if they
wish to continue to enjoy the advantages that
[ 45 ]
 David Weir and Clive Smallman
Managers in the year 2000
and after: a strategy for
development
Management Decision
36/1 [1998] 43–51
Downloaded by Western Sydney U At 21:36 14 October 2015 (PT)
[ 46 ]
they have had hitherto. Government is tight-
ening the nation’s purse strings and social
fabric in other ways, of course. People oper-
ate in a framework of increasing regulation.
Much of this is experienced by academics
and administrators alike as burdensome and
external. The requirements of the funding
councils and the Higher Education Quality
Council can often appear to be additional and
unwelcome harassment. Perhaps it is better
that they should be regarded as significant
aspects of the UK’s competitive advantage.
The global market in management education
is not interested in cheap and cheerful, it is
interested in quality. It is not consumed with
the routine distribution of already under-
stood knowledge codified and simplified. It is
interested in speeding organisational and
individual paths up the learning curve.
These are relative advantages for the educa-
tional providers of the developed world. UK
university courses are backed up by research
and their delivery systems can be supported
by state of the art technology, and this is
where the UK’s market advantage lies. Uni-
versity quality systems are supported by
governmental regulation, and the world on
the whole understands the framework of
British government administration and
trusts it.
The best basis for attacking an interna-
tional market is to command a secure home
market. The best way to offer an interna-
tional audience a guaranteed product is to
have secure systems in the home manufactur-
ing base. The same is true in higher educa-
tion. International markets are hard, com-
plex, competitive and differ one from another.
They should not be attempted by those who
do not have a secure base in their own culture
and systems. International markets cannot
substitute for a weak home market.
There is a general paradox of organisational
management as well: while senior manage-
ment of an organisation spend most of their
time and attention on making day-to-day oper-
ations as efficient as possible (doing things
right), it is in the realm of effectiveness (doing
the right things) that organisations will ulti-
mately be judged. What are the right things
for business schools? If these can be properly
identified then the task of doing things right,
which is what management seems most con-
cerned with, is surely secondary.
This does not mean, of course, that organi-
sations need not try to be efficient because
when the market formula is quite well known
or available to a number of producers it will
be the most cost efficient producer that cre-
ates the internal surplus to permit it to re-
invest in its own products. Rather, most
strategists in management agree that when
effectiveness and efficiency are in conflict it
is effectiveness that should be followed.
Is this lesson really being learned in univer-
sities at the present time? Where are their
market research departments? What is the
priority given to those who bring new knowl-
edge of the marketplace? And where will the
added value to the organisation come from?
Finally, strategy is concerned with the
future. Most organisations worry too much
about the present and forget that the future,
although in principle unknowable, is never
unavoidable. It will happen and the conse-
quences of changing markets, consumer
tastes and government regulation will create
different problems for the organisation to
cope with. It must have routines for dealing
with change.
Yet, there is an increasing body of knowl-
edge which implies that heavily formalised
strategic planning, of a kind that was fashion-
able in the 1960s, may be a snare and a delu-
sion. It becomes an end in itself and the
strategists become increasingly divorced
from the operations which is where the real
life of the organisation is.
It is time to get “back to basics”. The core
activity of a university is teaching, learning
and the creation and transmission of knowl-
edge. This is not, in principle, a process that
is amenable to very tight controls, least of all
on substance and quality. An hour may be as
well filled with verbiage as with seminal
insights. Lab time can be wasted. Computer
access can be wasted on games and surfing
rather than on upgrading and broadening a
knowledge base. What happens in the pri-
vacy of the lecture theatre is not easily mea-
surable, and the link between inputs and
outputs is very hard to trace. Even attempts
to gain apparently good numbers for manage-
ment purposes are questionable. Why is
student feedback immediately after a lecture
a good or even approximate measure of the
quality of the learning experience as evi-
denced by future behaviours perhaps long
years hence? The fact that something is mea-
surable in the here and now does not mean
that it is important in the long haul.
Probably the most widely used framework
for strategic analysis in the business organi-
sation of today is that codified by Porter
(1985). There are a few recurring basic
choices. Organisations can choose a cost
efficiency or cost leadership strategy, a differ-
entiation strategy, a quality strategy or an
innovation strategy.
The low cost producer considers such
options as substituting capital for labour, for
capital is cheaper in the long run, and will
try to move up the experience curve to obtain
economies of scale. Where technologies do
 David Weir and Clive Smallman
Managers in the year 2000
and after: a strategy for
development
Management Decision
36/1 [1998] 43–51
Downloaded by Western Sydney U At 21:36 14 October 2015 (PT)
not change and producers are roughly
equally positioned in terms of advantage in
the market increasing volume can drive
down average costs. The low cost producer
will of course try and take cost out of the
business by increasingly severe restrictions
on management discretion. They will try to
analyse contributions more precisely and
price aggressively to build volume. This type
of strategy is appropriate where products
are essentially commodities and where there
is high price elasticity in the markets.
A differentiated strategy is appropriate
when a firm can identify what is unique
about its own product in terms of design or
special features of quality or service. Where
there is a wide range of buyer and potential
buyer expectations and latent demands in
the market the greater the opportunities for
differentiation. The focus niche strategy is
appropriate where a firm has the potential
to specialise in a particular product market.
The specialisation or focus may be
geographically related to customer groups
or related to the functionality of the prod-
uct. A smaller company, with limited
resources, may find the focused niche strat-
egy appropriate.
The stage which an organisation is at rela-
tive to the market as a whole is also impor-
tant. Strategies should differ depending on
whether a business is starting up in a stage of
vertical integration, diversifying, or is trying
to turn around from a period of decline.
It goes without saying that these are not
necessarily easy judgements to make. For a
start most universities have not traditionally
thought in this way. They have been universi-
ties and, in the markets of knowledge, have
seen themselves as universal providers. Thus
a desire to be all things to all possible markets
has been the nature of their offering.
The Bradford Management Centre in the
past few years has on the whole gone for a
focused niche strategy. The strategy has been
to think through in which markets the Centre
will have a relative advantage. This is enabled
by the fact that the Management Centre has
from the start been a full service business
school. So the Bradford Management Centre
has had options that have not been available
to other business schools and, moreover, it
has had the opportunity to gain experience in
more than one kind of product. Furthermore,
a strategy of geographic dispersion has been
followed.
Not all similar business schools have
remained full service or have chosen to
become so. Many, like the London and Man-
chester Business Schools, have identified
their niche in the graduate business school
market. Here too there are differences. Some
business schools have backed up their dis-
tinctiveness as a graduate operation by inten-
sifying the research basis of their activities.
Others, like Ashridge, have aimed to be at the
state-of-the-art of their major corporate
clients and have bought the knowledge in;
they have majored in efficient delivery of
executive programmes.
Organisations need to consider a grow or
buy strategy. Growing brains is expensive
and time consuming. So some business
schools are net providers of trained doctor-
ates to the market, like Bradford. Others buy-
in the product of their competitors’ invest-
ment in PhDs. No one strategy is right, only
more or less appropriate for a particular
organisation. Bradford has a strong doctoral
programme and has the capability to operate
a “youth policy”.
What are the choices for medium-size uni-
versities in the provinces of the UK? Cer-
tainly there are distinctive perceptions in
the environment about what universities are
good at. Sometimes these are misconceived
or are based on the actual experience of a
previous generation. The market is not nec-
essarily always well informed, and arguably
universities have not invested as much as
they might have done in finding out how
they are in fact perceived by key groups of
customers and potential clients. They should
not perhaps be too obsessed with changes in
application rates for their various courses
but they should, as a matter of routine, be
spending time in the sixth forms of the
schools which send their products to them.
Certainly the Management Centre tries to
take as much heed as it can of business in
general and not necessarily just of those
companies and organisations which are
sending people on existing programmes.
So the Management Centre is active in
organisations like the Institute of Manage-
ment, the Yorkshire Publicity Association,
and, of course, the professional institutions
of Accounting, Marketing and Credit
Management.
The local community must always be a
major element of the environment of a uni-
versity. But universities do not always see
their local market as clearly as those in that
market see them. For example, the difference
between a university such as Glasgow, in
which over 70 per cent of the students come
from within the west of Scotland home envi-
ronment, and a north of England provincial
university, where there are no natural links
to the community, is striking indeed. In Glas-
gow it is not advisable to be out of step with
City Hall, the Scottish Development Agency,
and the major employers in the region.
Hence, the part-time mode of higher
[ 47 ]
 David Weir and Clive Smallman
Managers in the year 2000
and after: a strategy for
development
Management Decision
36/1 [1998] 43–51
Downloaded by Western Sydney U At 21:36 14 October 2015 (PT)
[ 48 ]
education is a normal and natural path for a
university to follow, the inevitable conse-
quence of decline in the unit of support from
central government, and a desirable outcome.
Universities which focus on the niche which
geography has given them will, almost cer-
tainly, have a competitive advantage. Success
in that niche will provide complementary
opportunities in overseas markets which are
networked with them.
Do all universities function equally effi-
ciently on their own national stage? Perhaps
not. The Bradford Management Centre aims
to be a strong local and regional provider of
high quality MBA programmes and to have
identified international markets where a
major provincial player can prosper. This
does not mean neglecting the national mar-
ket. It means accepting that Bradford may
never be number one in the national rankings
but can be number one or two of the major
international providers in a particular over-
seas location like Israel or Dubai or
Singapore.
These niches must not be chosen acciden-
tally but must be based on an understanding
of deliverables and an appreciation of what it
takes to stay in a market which is not intrinsi-
cally one’s own. History and long-standing
networks may be supportive aspects of a strat-
egy. (For example, in Singapore, any dinner
including top businessmen and government
officials will contain several Bradford gradu-
ates, and there are in excess of 500 Bradford
alumni in Hong Kong.)
So Bradford’s strategy has been to look for
strong players who have an assured position
in their own market. Thus, the Management
Centre’s associates in Israel are the Israel
Management Centre (the Israeli national
association of managers and a training
organisation). They have experience of organ-
ising classes, taking fees, regulating examina-
tions and recruiting students. Their partners
again are the Israel Association of Manufac-
turers, the equivalent of the UK’s Confedera-
tion of British Industry. They have an assured
market base in their members.
A case in point: the Bradford
Management Centre in the
international market
As markets have become more open and net-
works more developed it would be tempting to
claim that the Bradford Management Centre
has made all its strategic moves on the basis
of comprehensive strategic analysis based on
deep and detailed research. But this would be
a parody of history. Like most organisations
faced with the reality of a sudden explosion of
opportunity and the chance to enter previ-
ously inaccessible markets, the Bradford
development has been, at least in part, oppor-
tunistic. However, it has been guided by a
series of strategic considerations and its
activity has been restricted to a number of
strategic arenas.
The Bradford Management Centre is one of
the oldest established, major business
schools in the UK. It was founded in the
early 1960s, some five years before the Lon-
don and Manchester Business Schools, and
before the Normanbrook report which
recommended the creation in the UK of grad-
uate business schools on the north Ameri-
can pattern. Its first courses started in the
late 1950s. Its initial impact was in the field
of middle management short courses. But on
the foundation of the University of Bradford
it became involved in undergraduate and
postgraduate programmes leading to Bache-
lor’s and Master’s degrees. For the past 40
years, it has developed into a broad-based
provider of business and management edu-
cation, covering Bachelor’s, Master’s, doc-
toral, post-experience and short course pro-
grammes with an increasingly national and
international scope. Significantly, it has
developed as a university business school
with a strong emphasis on research. Because
of its initial emphasis on post-experience
work, it has aimed its MBA programmes at
the post-experience market. The average age
on the MBA varies year by year from just
below to just above 30. Bradford has devel-
oped an increasingly international focus and
has currently representatives from 45 coun-
tries on its various programmes.
There is a current debate in the UK around
the concept of “competence”. It is sometimes
argued that the production of knowledge-
based learning is not compatible with the
creation of competent managers. Bradford
has always striven to achieve excellence in
both of these dimensions. Along with the
drive to create research of international stan-
dards of excellence, there has been an empha-
sis on activity, skill and competence-based
knowledge acquisition.
The Bradford Management Centre has
been an innovator in educational and peda-
gogic terms. While many UK-based business
schools have entered the market of Continen-
tal Europe through alliances and exchange
programmes (often funded through govern-
mental and inter-governmental agencies and
the European Union) Bradford has been
among the first to develop its own pro-
grammes in The Netherlands through its
partner, The Netherlands Institute for MBA
Studies (NIMBAS). This enables participants
based in or near Utrecht to undertake the
 David Weir and Clive Smallman
Managers in the year 2000
and after: a strategy for
development
Management Decision
36/1 [1998] 43–51
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Bradford MBA, not on a distance learning
basis, but through an associate institution.
The qualification is, in every respect, the
same level as the programme studied at
Bradford. It is examined by the same examin-
ers and the degrees awarded at the same
degree ceremony. The relationship between
NIMBAS and Bradford is a symbiotic one. It
is not strictly customer-supplier, nor is it a
simple franchise. It has elements of both.
Perhaps the closest analogy from the busi-
ness world would be that NIMBAS represents
a long-term trading partner, tied by relation-
ships of mutual interest to Bradford. One of
the mutualities of interest, of course, lies in
maintaining the high quality of the Bradford
NIMBAS programme. This model has now
been further developed in Israel and the
United Arab Emirates. Specialist Master’s
programmes are also available in Malaysia
and Singapore.
Undergraduate exchanges have followed a
more conventional development with special
tailoring to suit the separate national educa-
tional systems in the different countries with
which Bradford has exchanges. These cur-
rently include France, Denmark and Spain.
Bradford is not attempting to focus, for exam-
ple, on English speaking partners, nor on
specific geographical segments. The prime
consideration in seeking partners has been
based on the relative standing of prospective
partner institutions in their own national
markets. Thus, for various reasons, few
liaisons have been entered into with business
schools in the capital cities of other European
countries. In the case of the University of
Mauritius, with which relationships have
developed in the past six years, the University
of Mauritius Business School is the leading
player in that country’s market for higher
business education. It is one of the most
promising economies in the emerging Indian
Ocean rim markets.
The same principles have guided Bradford’s
developments in Eastern Europe. The Man-
agement Centre has looked for institutional
stability, strong and focused academic pro-
grammes, and has sought to develop relation-
ships with partner institutions which have a
similar standing in their own national mar-
ket to that which Bradford enjoys in the
British market. Bradford has not gone for
unprofitable volume or for aid and subsidy
projects.
An example of the mutuality of interest is
the programme developed with the Univer-
sity of Miskolc in Eastern Hungary. Miskolc
is far from being well-known in western
Europe. It is a place with not many obvious
attractions as a vacation destination and the
university is not itself an institution with a
particularly strong record in business and
management studies. However, Miskolc is
one of the leading provincial cities in Hun-
gary. The university is approximately 400
years old and has always enjoyed a high
reputation. It serves a strong provincial
market as well as contributing to the grow-
ing national market for the scarce resource
of highly trained managers. It is a stable
institution with a high reputation in its
national market. It is also itself strongly
networked, particularly within Eastern
Europe and in Germany. Bradford faculty
has jointly worked with colleagues at the
University of Miskolc in developing core
institutional capability to undertake Bache-
lor’s and Master’s degree programmes of a
fairly traditional kind. This represents a
congruence of Bradford skills and their
needs. Within the next few years, as Miskolc
develops its own capability, there will be
opportunities for joint research and for
increasingly sophisticated training
programmes.
Another example of co-operative activity
based on relative competitive strengths is the
Tempus programme in which the Manage-
ment Centre is linked with the universities of
Tilburg, Antwerp, Bratislava and Poznan.
Bradford has a long tradition of sandwich
education, in which a year of undergraduate
formation is spent in industry. Consequently
Bradford staff have relatively strong skills in
industrial placement and supervision, which
enabled the Management Centre to offer a
unique contribution to the research of part-
ner schools which had been converted to
serve the training and development needs of
East European managers. The placement
year enables Bradford to offer a specialist
qualification, involving practical and theoret-
ical aspects – the Diploma of Management
Practice. The Management Centre has just
initiated a similar programme with the
Technical University of Ostrava, in the Czech
Republic, with partners in Aarhus and
Lisbon.
A key concern in all these developments
has been to focus on the long term. Bradford
does not have the resources to move swiftly
into and out of a number of markets, making
large financial gains on the way. The aim is to
build partnerships for the medium and long
term in the likely knowledge that partner
institutions will remain strong players in
their own national markets. This militates
against short-term financial and competitive
considerations and in favour of long-term
relationship building. Partnership building
is the essence of the Management Centre’s
strategy.
[ 49 ]
 David Weir and Clive Smallman
Managers in the year 2000
and after: a strategy for
development
Management Decision
36/1 [1998] 43–51
Downloaded by Western Sydney U At 21:36 14 October 2015 (PT)
[ 50 ]
A key element in the development of a com-
petitive strategy for the Bradford Manage-
ment Centre has been a consideration of the
precise importance of location. Within the
UK home market, the location of Bradford is
relatively disadvantageous compared to other
business schools located closer to London and
the Thames Valley South Midlands axis in
which most major British business schools,
with the exception of Warwick, Manchester
and Bradford, are located. Most executive
development budgets are controlled from
head offices in London and the South East of
England.
Bradford has attempted to capitalise on its
position as a leading player in the regional
market by developing a specific product, the
part-time MBA programme. But this is the
only one of the products which relates to that
regional position. The Management Centre
would therefore have a choice of becoming a
second division or intermittent premier divi-
sion player, if its activities were restricted to
the UK market alone.
However, in the international market, and
particularly in relation to western Europe,
Bradford’s location does not represent a com-
parative competitive disadvantage. Indeed, as
far as Benelux countries and Northern
Europe are concerned, access is equally as
good as from the London area. In terms of
more distant markets, Bradford’s research
strength in Asia-Pacific economies and spe-
cial interest in management in Arab coun-
tries also present non-location-specific
advantages.
Bradford has ignored apparently attractive
opportunities in parts of the international
market where it had no knowledge base or
prospects of finding a suitable institutional
partner to learn along with. This has so far
kept us out of the former Soviet Union, Latin
America and much of Africa. On the other
hand, it has also kept Bradford away from the
fallacious strategy of attempting to move to a
position of market leadership in markets
which the Management Centre did not under-
stand and in which exploitation would chiefly
depend on economies of scale. Business
schools are not especially good at exploiting
economies of scale nor in expanding their
scope quickly.
Bradford therefore tends to map the world
in a way which makes sense to it. In most
cases the Management Centre is not sure
when it enters a specific situation what the
ideal vision of its future activity in that mar-
ket will be. To admit ignorance in these cases
is neither ignominious, nor is it an admission
of a lack of strategy. It is an acceptance that
strategy often follows successful initiatives.
Most large corporations approach the global
market in the same way.
Nor has Bradford found it profitable to
think in terms of a brand-driven strategy,
although this terminology is currently fash-
ionable in some quarters when considering
the evolution of service providers. There are
not in fact in the management and business
school world very many strong brands, with
the possible exception of Harvard and
INSEAD. The brand identity of a major full-
service business school is, in fact, a complex
and multi-faceted one with varying positions
being occupied by the brand in the different
market segments in which the institution
operates.
In the field of doctoral research, Bradford
has strong brand identity. In executive devel-
opment work, however, its brand identity is
less visible because of a strategy which is
relationship – rather than brand attribute –
driven. This has led to the emergence of spe-
cific and, in some cases, unique products
such as Executive MBAs which are, unusu-
ally in the British executive development
market, single-company focused.
The Management Centre lays no claims to
originality in its developmental strategy or its
presentation. Elements of the strategy are
quite close to the ways in which the Japanese
subcontracting system has been transmuted
from an essentially pyramidal to an essen-
tially network structure, but primarily Brad-
ford’s strategic development has followed
rather conventional business lines with a
view to perceiving the strategic alliances as
the end product of a relationship rather than
the focus of a market entry strategy. Strategic
alliances are being built firmly on the reality
of continuing, effective and supportive busi-
ness and intellectual relationships with insti-
tutions that, in the main, mirror some aspect
of Bradford’s own behaviours. The Manage-
ment Centre has not, however, sought to seek
mirror images of its own institutional struc-
tures or philosophy. Rather, it has taken each
market and each issue on a case-by-case exam-
ple seeking to respond to perceived demands
from other markets and to add what Bradford
faculty has learned to the benefit of our long
and broad experience of management educa-
tion to the capabilities which already exist in
organisations which have a reasonably secure
position in their own market and reasonable
potential for further innovation.
Conclusion
The Bradford approach to management devel-
opment has from the start concentrated on the
link between knowledge and competence,
 David Weir and Clive Smallman
Managers in the year 2000
and after: a strategy for
development
Management Decision
36/1 [1998] 43–51
Downloaded by Western Sydney U At 21:36 14 October 2015 (PT)
contributing to the practice of management.
As the world of management has globalised so
has Bradford’s part of the knowledge business.
As the requirements of organisations like the
BBC for the more specific application of gen-
eral management knowledge to their business
have become more focused, our products have
become more customised. The Management
Centre has instituted language teaching and
formalised its approach to placement supervi-
sion. It has responded to the demands for more
on the job learning, through strengthening
mentoring alliances and introducing action
learning based programmes.
The history of the Bradford Management
Centre and its path to a position as a leading
Application questions
1 How do you see management skills evolv-
ing as we move into the new millennium?
Are you ready to move from a hedgehog,
to a fox culture? Or are you already
there?
2 Is your local business school offering the
sort of support you need? Is it listening to
the local business community? Or
international business school is one of mar-
kets, strategic alliances and product develop-
ment, of proactive ventures into an increas-
ingly globalised world economy. The reality of
its success at carrying the Bradford message
will be one of people, alumni, trained gradu-
ates, flexible, adaptive and creative, carrying
the Bradford message of “making knowledge
work”, on the back of a fox culture. The Brad-
ford Management Centre is preparing man-
agement for the millennium.
Reference
Porter, M.E. (1985), Competitive Advantage: Creat-
ing and Sustaining Superior Performance, The
Free Press, New York, NY.
is it just concerned with the major
players?
3 Is your business strategy appropriate for
dealing with the changes that will
inevitably occur in the twenty-first cen-
tury? Is it sufficiently fluid to cope?
4 Is your organisation developing millen-
nium management?
[ 51 ]