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New Mission for Business Managers
Svenson, Arthur L.
7/4  (Summer 1965): 47-52

The article presents information on a new mission for business managers, both in the public and private sectors. While the entrepreneurial decision is innovative in anticipating change, the management decision has taken for granted that change has not and would not occur. Broadly, the difference between these two classes of decision is the view of business as usual and the view of business as unusual. The cost of entrepreneurial business decisions has been understandably high because of their exaggerated degree of uncertainty, in contrast to the cost characteristics of the management decisions. But when the innovating decision has proved successful, the reward or profit has more than offset the value of the allocated resources. More important than this estimation and handling of risk, however, has been the recent, largely successful mastery of new risks through human intelligence. It is a job of educating public managers to grasp the vision and the risk-taking approach of private industry. This is a new, formidable mission that confronts this generation of business management, but it must be undertaken if one is to escape a culture driven with problems resulting from scientific and technological imbalance.

 

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