Are you managing or gambling?
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A successful business must have profitability, liquidity and growth: these do not come about by accident, and managers who do not plan and control to these ends are not managing a business but gambling against the odds. With that challenging summary the Training Board's TASC managers this week bring to a close their most useful and stimulating series of articles in our Management Matters columns. We have been delighted to carry to a wider audience the vital management messages which they put over to their business improvement groups in the course of their normal work. And we hope and believe that this series will have led many, many readers to put their own businesses under the microscope to identify their particular problems and shortcomings and then apply the recommended techniques in an effort to remedy them.
If it has done nothing else, we believe these articles will have helped to remove the air of mysticism which, supported by jargon, has grown up around management techniques. The authors have shown how firmly based in common sense are the main methods recommended. Even more effectively, they have given examples of the benefits obtained by companies within their own training experience—including a typical rescue operation in which a company's slide towards bankruptcy was identified and checked.
Every business is hit when times are hard, as they have been over the past year, but the small and medium-sized company is particularly vulnerable because it seldom has any margin or reserve to cushion the blows. The RTITB's management men have shown these businesses how they can increase their chances of survival and provide a basis for growth by logical processes of examination and action that are well within the scope of the average operator. And it is no answer to say that there isn't the time: such time could never be better spent.