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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/eb002183. When citing the article, please cite: W.A.G. Braddick, (1984), “How Top Managers Really Learn”, Journal of European Industrial Training, Vol. 8 Iss: 7, pp. 9 - 12.

This feature, specially prepared for RDM by Mr W A G Braddick, Deputy Principal of Ashridge Management College, outlines how management training must keep pace with developments in the distribution scene.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

Top management have no time for theory, abstraction and lengthy written analysis: “action learning” in the “real world” is what they respond to.

In recent years particular attention has been focused on what managers do and how they learn, and useful research has emerged from both sides of the Atlantic.

Preparing a one‐month course for any group of adult students presents problems. When the course is for middle and senior managers, things may be that much trickier. Apart from anything else there is no general agreement on what the content of a management course should be, but — particularly with a group of this sort — there will inevitably be a wide variation in experience, educational background and training. Probably most important of all, however, managers tend to be doers rather than thinkers: they are generally not academically inclined and do not take kindly to the passive role of an attentive student.

In the previous two articles, we explained the background, the steps in design and testing, and discussed in detail the components of the Staff Appraisal Training package and how it is being used in the Civil Service. In this, the last article, we go on to describe the lessons we learned during the life of this fascinating project and to make suggestions about how the material can be used by organisations outside the Civil Service.

There is a growing need for management education and management development. Business organisations need a supply of well‐educated and behaviourally competent managers. Business schools and business organisations are not fulfilling this need at present. Both must increase the effectiveness of current business school faculty, curricula and operations. Businesses need to become more involved in helping business schools become more effective and efficient. This requires an exchange which is mutually beneficial and based on mutual respect. Business organisations must demand high quality services from education. Current areas of strength and weakness in management education are identified from a business perspective. Appropriate roles and action steps for these schools and organisations are proposed to strengthen their effectiveness.

Although a great deal of research has focused on global marketing strategy development and implementation, little research has focused on the global marketing managers charged with the responsibilities of developing and implementing such strategy. The aim of this paper is to develop a model that identifies a set of soft skills that have the ability to increase the effectiveness of global marketing managers in making the tactical adaptations necessary to develop and implement global marketing strategy in an increasingly complex and dynamic marketplace.

A conceptual model is developed with coinciding propositions.

The model developed theorizes that the ability of global marketing managers to make tactical adaptations to the firm's global marketing strategy (and thus enhance performance) is driven by the soft skills of tacit knowledge, experience, learning, unlearning, intuition, self‐confidence, flexibility, prioritization of problems, working under pressure and ambiguity tolerance.

The model highlights the specific soft skills that firms can work to foster in their global marketing managers and educators can work to incorporate within a curriculum. Through the development of these soft skills within a firm's global marketing managers, the firm can achieve a competitive position within the marketplace.

This study is one of the first to conceptualize a specific set of soft skills that enhance a global marketing manager's ability to make tactical adaptations to the firm's global marketing strategy by which the firm can be more competitive. As such, this study provides for a better understanding of how soft skills relate to the development and implementation of global marketing strategy and how firms can be more competitive by not only employing unique human capital, but by developing global marketing managers who are more effective at adapting to constantly changing global market conditions.

Interpersonal skills training is commonly carried out by skilled tutors who provide feedback and guidelines to trainees, based on their performance in role played interactions. Unfortunately, such tutoring sessions do not always go as planned. The result may be minor “hiccups” which impair the smooth flow of the proceedings or a “tutor's nightmare” where all appears lost. It can be very unnerving for the inexperienced tutor who encounters problems such as a role player who dries up or a course member who resolutely refuses to accept feedback. In this article we describe 13 of the more common tutoring problems, together with our suggestions concerning ways in which they may be handled. These suggestions are not intended to be prescriptive, but they may provide trainee tutors with something to fall back on whilst they are developing their own ways of handling tutoring problems.