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Management Potential: Early Recognition and Development
Fitzgerald, T. H., and H. C. Carlson
14/2  (Winter 1971): 18-23

Selecting future managers is a serious responsibility, not only for corporations but for the entire country. As with our other new responsibilities, this one has come quietly upon us. It is now important because of the growth in size of the U.S. corporations and the change from individual, entrepreneurial ownership to dispersed public ownership. The decision makers in the corporations now act as agents and employees of the owners, rather than as majority owners themselves. A wider responsibility for both policy and operations falls upon the professional employee managers "The New Class." As a practical matter, day-to-day decisions cannot wait upon a referendum of the stockholders who are most often anonymous, remote, and transient. Among the decisions these managers make is the designation of their successors. They choose who among the many candidates inherits working control of the business, who in the future fills which places in the administrative hierarchy. How well these choices are made matters greatly to stockholders, to the managers themselves, to the other employees, and increasingly to the general public, because future growth and profitability, the security of the enterprise, and its capability to assume broader social responsibilities, depends on them.

 

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