Abstract

For a six-months period from September 1961, to February 1962, a group of 217 Texas business executives representing 46 different companies participated in a management game. While training business executives via management games has become "old hat" over the past five years, the training of these Texas business executives represented a new, unique, and long-overdue experiment in developing the talents of the managers of small business concerns. Over the years, a variety of approaches have been devised and used in attempting to strengthen the skills of the small-business manager. Both public and private organizations have provided a wealth of literature along with a diversity of programs designed especially to assist the smaller firm in its training needs. While there seems to be no easy and straightforward answer to the question of how the small-business executive can be given the tools of management so vital to survival in a competitive society, most approaches could be best described as offering individual assistance in specific problem areas. Much of the assistance is in the form of "bread and butter techniques" such as supplying a business with a standard cost system, planning its financial requirements, and even evaluating actual against programmed operating results.