BUSINESS MEN AND MANAGERSThere has never been any question about the future of managers and management. They are as necessary to nationalized industry and state controlled corporations as to private firms. Under any industrial system. Organizers are necessary. Today, managerial prestige is high and rising. Some workplace thought that nationalization meant the end of all bosses – but they have now discovered how wrong they were.
The public may often read complaints in newspapers to the effect that British management is not good enough. But it cannot fail to read that efforts are being made to improve management like any other profession such as medicine, architecture, or teaching. The labour government first gave state support to training for management in Britain, and sought to increase the supply of managers for industry. Professional management is now solidly established. Its role in society, whether capitalistic, socialistic or mixed, is as settled as that of the civil service.
Business men are something different. They direct, they control, they decide policy, and they have power. They found, inherit, own, buy, sell, and expand business- and they may bankrupt them. They are the employers of the managers, as much as they are the employers of workpeople. They are the men at the top.
The differences between the salaried managers and the individual capitalist who owns the company of which he is chairman is clear enough. The distinction is between men who understand the strategy of business and those who are only concerned with their own functions. The salaried company official in middle management, whose highest ambition is to be head of his department and retire on the firm’s pension scheme just like his suburban neighbor, a civil servant, will not think of himself as a business man as he thinks of one of his directors as a business man, or the tough owners of firms with whom he deals, or the proprietors of the garage that services his car. Plenty of men in middle management have, of course, business strategy in the blood and are determined to rise, whether in their own company or another, to a position where they will have scope to make business decisions. These are, in our sense, potential business men.
It is significant that some people would like to drop the word “business man” altogether. Young men who do not care to admit that are going into business can nowadays say that they are going into management. Some directors like to speak of their companies as “organization” serving the public rather than as business making profits, and refer to themselves as simply senior members of the management team. Many business men prefer to be described as directors, industrialists, executives, etc. But directors do not as a rule like to be called managers. On the contrary, there are directors of small firms who have refused better paid jobs in larger firms because they would there lose the status and title of “director”.
The frontier between business men and managers is thus for many reasons hard to define.


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