Professor A. D. Baxter opened the discussion and outlined how the 1964 Industrial Training Act had led to increased awareness of the need for trained and professional skill in management. The Central Training Council set up a Management Training and Development Committee, whose recent booklet “Management Training and Development” (HMSO) was the subject of discussion. There is now, for the first time, a national policy for producing better managers supported by financial sticks and carrots. It was the intention that this new move should lead to a massive scale of training of existing and future managers thereby improving managerial effectiveness, the usage of national resources and thereby the financial situation of firms and of the country.

During the evening no one criticised the national policy, except to say that it was expressed in such broad terms, in the form of a “child's guide”, whose benefits would depend, therefore, on how the policy was interpreted by the Industrial Training Boards. It was too early to say yet whether it would be well interpreted and resolve the special problems of highly technical industries such as aerospace.