Search for Talent

The scarcest commodity both in young nations and in old European nations that feel the need to learn new industrial ways is often neither labor nor raw materials; it is well-trained business managers. With 176 graduate schools of business turning out eager beavers, the U.S. is well supplied with business talent, but many other countries have to scramble to get the managers they badly need. Many nations that once scorned business schools as mere trade schools are now opening some of their own. Most are patterned after U.S. business schools, particularly after the dean of them all, Harvard Business School. Sought as a model because of its highly successful case-study method of teaching and its afteryears courses to upgrade already experienced businessmen, Harvard in recent years has exported a score of professors, been the inspiration for business schools in Tur key, Italy, Mexico, Japan, France, Switzerland, Spain and Pakistan.

No Room. Tokyo boasts of its "humble Japanese edition of Harvard Business School," and Harvard helped to turn an old Cistercian nunnery at Fontainebleau into the excellent European Institute of Business Administration. But not even Harvard can meet all the demands. Last week the Peruvian government announced plans to open, with the help of U.S. aid money, a graduate school of business administration mod eled after Stanford University's school. Fortnight ago Britain's Lord Oliver Franks, retired chairman of Lloyd's of London and a former British ambassador to the U.S., issued an industrysponsored report strongly calling for the establishment of new business schools in Manchester and London.

The new schools are answers to de mands from businessmen for U.S.-style facilities to train both university graduates and experienced executives in such bedrock business principles as finance, marketing, personnel relations and production management. There are already about 150 institutions outside the U.S. that call themselves business schools, but most of them deal heavily in esoteric theory rather than practical problems, do not draw the best students. On the other hand, such good schools as the 96-year-old Ecole de Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Paris had room for only 300 candidates out of 1,600 applicants last year. Among its graduates: Automaker Francois Peugeot and Louis Vaudable, owner of Maxim's.

One for the Boss. Several U.S. business schools have helped to set up counterparts in many countries: Michigan State sent 30 faculty members to Brazil's Sao Paulo to help set up the Es-cola de Administra?ao, now considered Latin America's best business school. But in highly industrialized West Germany there are practically no business schools; both universities and businessmen resist teaching courses in business, arguing that a man usually stays with one company all his life and can learn all he needs on the job. This attitude is not dominant in the rest of Western Europe. Such companies as Nestle in Switzerland and E.N.I., Italy's state-owned oil and gas monopoly, wanted schools so badly that each has sponsored its own.

While new business schools abroad are designed to make competent executives out of every student, they are also becoming valuable training grounds for the wealthy sons of managers of family-owned businesses, who are certain, in the West European tradition, to take over the firm some day. The outstanding Escuela Superior de Administration y Direction de Empresas in Barcelona has recognized this fact of life by gearing three separate courses. One is for already established managers, one for relatives who are certain to become boss, and one for youths presumably destined by circumstance to rise no higher than departmental heads.

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