Philip Sadler - British business educator - Profiles in Executive Education

Business Horizons, July-August, 1996 by Harper W. Moulton

As for the automobile industry, Sadler observed that in the whole terrible period of the decline of British Leyland, for example, it was tragic to see collective myopia accompanied by collective complacency. Of note was the conspicuous absence of participants from the British motor industry at Ashridge. Only one senior manager from a Leyland truck plant attended, and he stated up front that it would be a total waste of time as far as solving his industrial relations problems. At the end of three weeks, however, he exclaimed, "If only I could have done this ten years ago!"

Sadler's readings of Drucker and his own observations pointed to Great Britain's becoming a "soft market" desperately vulnerable to attack from the Far East, especially in the automobile and electronics industries. For one thing, he recalls, "We lost our earlier addiction to buying British." Coupled with that was a fatal tendency on the part of manufacturers to hark back to British engineering achievements of the past and assume that a brief supremacy was immortal. This was reinforced by the war when, objectively, the Spitfire and Hurricane fighter aircraft were better products than the Messerschmitt and Heinkel. The Spitfire was even seen as a powerful symbol of national technological supremacy. Noted Sadler, "It took a long time to realize that the pace of innovation and the changing nature of demand were such that our products were in danger of being left behind."

In the area of marketing, one of the "fatal flaws" in British industrial attitudes was illuminated when a guest lecturer at Ashridge from a well-known electronics company was asked why the Japanese were so far ahead in video cameras. He replied that his company had a marvelous product so far advanced that no Japanese camera could touch it. When asked when it would be in the shops, he replied with a pained expression, "Oh, we are not putting it on the market. We are developing it for the BBC."

Another of Sadler's favorite horror stories occurred when the head of one of Britain's largest nationalized industries, which was then turning in appalling results, mentioned that the firm had just acquired a "fantastic" marketing director. Sadler expressed keen interest to hear of this man's sparkling track record. "Yes," said the state industry chairman, complacently, "he probably knows more about minor seventeenth-century poets than anyone else in the country."

Those days are gone, however. The professionally educated manager is no longer an endangered species struggling to survive against the entrenched British preference for what Sadler calls the "untutored" managers as opposed to the "pushy young MBA."

Talk of management as a profession leads to the growing importance of ethics as a business study. Professions such as law, medicine, and so on almost by definition operate on codes of ethics. Sadler himself has taught the subject in the context of business strategy in Ashridge's MBA course, now in its seventh year with 50 international students. "Commercial pressures resulting from ethical issues can't be ignored," he adds wryly. "I'm sorry to say there are so many case studies that plenty of material is there."