Implications for Business and Government

Many businessmen, especially those who take the time to reflect upon what it is that they are trying to do, feel a sense of inad- equacy when they compare themselves with other professional occupations. There seems to be a deficit in their understanding of the situation in which they are working; the tasks facing them seem not only interminable but intractable to analysis. They know of no alternative way of working but to proceed by intuition and hunch, or what seems no more than ‘muddling through’. Whereas professions like medicine, accounting and the law have at their disposal a body of knowledge which they can rely upon to provide them with clear-cut answers in most situations, all that businessmen can fall back on are the ill-founded general- isations offered by management consultants or the equally inadequate remedies marketed by academics. These propositions are usually too vague to be helpful, and change with disconcert- ing frequency. Thus the thinking businessman, consciously or unconsciously, often feels intellectually inferior to his professional counterparts.