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The Management Development needs of Small Business: Farmers and Hunters

In a recent article* I expressed a fear that much of the management training available to the manager of smaller firms was directed towards the least significant aspects of his activities and behaviour. In this context the management training contribution to improving his total performance could at best be marginal and at worst counter-productive: and all this for an input which was high cost, and itself difficult to manage. I went on to suggest that no help was on offer in the main field in which the smaller businessman needs help. His overwhelming need is to learn how to operate successfully in an external environment which he can rarely either predict or control. I compared the activities of the larger and the small businessmen to those of farmers and hunters. The senior to middle manager in the larger firm farms levelled and tilled ground; he plans the rotation of his crops, their harvesting and yield in a careful and skilled manner; he deals with the encroachment of the jungle by pushing back the frontiers of cultivation; and he prepares new ground for farming well in advance. These planning skills, making the unpredictable predictable, the uncontrollable controllable, are developed to a very high order in most large businesses. The man who manages the smaller enterprise is not so placed. He operates from a small clearing in the heart of the jungle where there is so little to control and predict, that he leaves it to the women, children and the aged. His main skills are those of the hunter. He moves off regularly into the unpredictable, and uncontrollable jungle where the rewards can be high if he wishes to take risks. Of course, like the farmer, he can go for low risk, low reward, and live at subsistence level on berries and roots many jungle people and most small businessmen do. But with a few good weapons and tools, the skills to approach and also retreat, plus the attitudes needed to withdraw, to wait and to pounce; he can tackle fair sized prey. And if he doesn’t get this one he may get the next. It is these weapons and tools, these skills and above all these attitudes with which I am concerned here. For it is in these areas that management training inputs are needed, if more small businessmen are to lift their eyes from the berries and the roots. Abandoning the metaphor, it will be fruitful to delineate these new needs by exploring them in the context of a few well-established skills and resources on which the manager of the larger enterprise relies.