Management, Education and National Policies

• Author: Courtney Blackman
• Pages: 330-339

THE PRACTICE OF ECONOMIC MANAGEMENT

330

The text of my address, to borrow an ecclesiastical term, is taken

from Peter Drucker’s definitive work, Management: Tasks,

Responsibilities, Practices:1 ‘Economic and social development means

above all management.’ Economists in the 1950s identified the

establishment of modern institutions as a prerequisite of economic

development in the Third World. However, they paid very little

attention to management in the process of institutional

development. In our region, ideological fervour and political

commitment were widely believed, during the 1960s and the

1970s, to be the wellsprings of economic development.

From the mid-1970s I had the temerity to suggest that

management was the critical element in economic development.

In a 1975 paper entitled ‘The Economic Development of Small

Countries: A Managerial Approach’,2 I spoke of the ‘managerial

imperative’ in economic development. I suggested that economic

development required the diffusion of sound management

practices throughout the entire economy — in government, in

business enterprises, in hospitals, in schools, in the church and

even in our homes. I opposed nationalization, not on ideological

grounds, but because it implied the creation of larger organizations

whose complexity would overwhelm the meagre managerial

resources of Caribbean states. The collapse of the Marxist and

‘dependence’ paradigms in the Caribbean has cleared the way

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MANAGEMENT, EDUCATION AND

NATIONAL POLICIES