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The first article on the subject, which appeared in the August issue of Industrial and Commercial Training, described the development of a training course in BEA for Passenger Services Staff. The aim of this training is to improve personal service. Its most important element is role‐playing of typical interactions between staff and passengers; these are recorded on video‐tape and replayed for viewing and discussion. A good deal of reading, thinking and research was done before and during the training development. Visits were made to the training centres of several airlines, in Britain and the USA; research workers in both countries were also consulted. Five relevant views of the subject will be examined. These are: • the concept of social skill — Michael Argyle • the analysis of verbal behaviours — Neil Rackham • T‐group training — particularly the research by Cary Cooper and Henry Odie for the Hotel and Catering ITB • transactional analysis — work in Pan American Airways and American Airlines • applied learning in management training — by Mel Sorcher and Arnold Goldstein of Syracuse, USA A reading list giving references to these ideas and authors is given at the end of the article. The intention here is briefly to describe these views, evaluate their relevance to Customer Service Training generally, and show how they have influenced the philosophy and the design of the BEA training. Naturally, more weight will be given to one view than to another in the analysis that follows, but it should be emphasised that there is no intention to choose nor to reject any particular theory or training development. The different approaches are often complementary, each provides insight into the problems of human interaction.

Very few studies have investigated what actually goes on face‐to‐face during a negotiation. Two reasons account for this lack of published research. Firstly, real negotiators are understandably reluctant to let a researcher watch them at work. Such research requires the consent of both negotiating parties and constitutes a constraint on a delicate situation. The second reason for the poverty of research in this area is lack of methodology. Until recently there were few techniques available which allowed an observer to collect data on the behaviour of negotiators without the use of cumbersome and unacceptable methods such as questionnaires.

A previous article by Leslie Rae appeared in ICT June 1977 and described a course in Interpersonal Skills training which had been running in the Employment Service Agency for some two years. Response from readers of the article raised many questions about the course and, in particular, the use of Behaviour Analysis in a practical training situation. This article is in response to these enquiries, and also the writer had realised that the statistical population encountered in a number of courses was sufficient to commence forming conclusions on the effectiveness of the use of Behaviour Analysis in this particular form of training. The sharing of similar experiences would be welcomed by Mr Rae.

A. Introduction 1. Resumé In our first article we presented a case for using behaviour analysis as a method of differentiating between successful and average negotiators. Our findings about the successful negotiator's behaviour during a negotiation are summarised below.

The corporate world is in the midst of a significant shift in business strategy. It's a shift so visible that it seems almost trite to catalog it. The management gurus who chronicle business trends each have their own way to describe it. Michael Hammer of reengineering fame, whose work has generally been associated with the cost side of the business equation, talks of it as a shift to “long‐term growth on the revenue side.” John DeVincentis, leader of McKinsey's Worldwide Sales and Channel Management practice, calls it “a new focus on the top line.” In essence, the established strategic emphasis on bottom‐line efficiency that gave the business world such familiar techniques as downsizing, restructuring, overhead value analysis, and reengineering is being replaced by a new interest in strategies for boosting growth.

Reference librarians in various library settings are often assigned responsibilities for training students, support staff, or other new professionals, a task for which they rarely have sufficient professional education. This bibliography recommends readings on topics that will assist reference librarians in understanding the philosophy of staff development. The readings listed here cover subjects such as: establishing an atmosphere that facilitates learning, assessing training needs, describing competent performance, writing clear and specific objectives, selecting appropriate training methods, maintaining skills and providing feedback, and evaluating the effectiveness of a training program.

In the summer of 1971 I found myself on a London‐bound train wondering why on earth I had said goodbye to my wife in order to spend a week on a DES course in group teaching methods at the Polytechnic of Central London. Didn't I have a research project to attend to? And what about those lecture notes? Could I really afford this week of eating too much food and talking to people I would probably never meet again! On arrival my mind was firmly made up — I could not afford the time, but it was too late to do anything about it. The reception at PCL eased my conscience a little but my first impressions of some of the course members dampened my spirits yet further. Surely I can't put up with a week of their company! And when I looked at the programme my feelings were reinforced. Who on earth was this fellow Rackham, down to talk about measuring behaviour on the first day? I hoped he would be some uninspiring unknown who would further reinforce my rapidly solidifying attitudes against the course. But Monday was a very different day. From the moment Neil Rackham was introduced I experienced an awful guilty feeling, for I realised that what he was going to talk about was so relevant to my own work. More importantly, what he actually did talk about was relevant, too. All those points about factual scoring, tally marks, ratio analysis of behavioural items, observed frequencies — why, was I not trying to do the same thing with my DMS students? Were not my colleagues and I doing group type activities on residential courses, and were we not always meeting to discuss ways of observing group behaviour and feeding back the information?

In 1971, through the pages of this journal, a group of psychologists and trainers, which included Morgan and Rackham, presented to the training world an account of ideas and techniques which they had evolved through two and a half years of research and development work. What they described, with ill‐concealed enthusiasm and excitement, were approaches to training managers and supervisors in the skills of dealing with others which, in the context of available alternatives, seemed to constitute a major breakthrough in both concept and method. It was expected that there would be widespread interest in the approaches — and this has been amply confirmed. However, the interest has been rather less widely translated into application — partly, we suspect, because of the high level trainer skills required to run this kind of training, which take time to acquire, and even more because of the resources needed to mount the training. These resources are beyond small, and most medium sized, companies. Three years on, we are unable to bring glad tidings that things are any different in these respects: if anything, we are more than ever conscious of the skills and resources demanded by interactive skills training if it is to be effective. But if you are a trainer in a small or medium company, please do not stop reading at this point. One of the purposes of this article is to describe the course that the Air Transport and Travel ITB now runs which makes this kind of training available to the managers and supervisors of companies who are unable, for one reason or another, to mount it for themselves.

If you have lasted the course and read all six previous articles in this DIS series, I expect you could be feeling pretty overwhelmed by now. You will have read about behaviour analysis categories, computer‐assisted feedback, operations rooms manned by behavioural scientists and lots more besides. In this article I am going to cut straight through all the paraphernalia and show you how to apply something of these new methods with minimal resources. When I talk of resources, I'm thinking of money, people and time. In so doing I shall make my colleagues wince because, inevitably, the starter suggestions I shall make fall a long way short of the sort of standards we have become used to in ICL and BOAC. My colleagues will wince because the standards they are used to are not absurdly high. The practices described in the previous articles exist and are carried out because we believe them to be both realistic and necessary. I am prepared to leave them wincing if I can do something to give you a leg up into the interactive skills area. At the very start we said that our purpose in publishing this DIS series at all was to encourage trainers to implement, and put into everyday use, some of the new methods which we have developed in our work. Neil Rackham actually invited you to ‘plagiarise, copy, adapt, modify or develop anything which you read in these articles’. And this is surely sensible. You will have noticed our own unashamed references to plagiarism throughout the previous articles. The existence of this current article should reinforce our sincerity in making such an invitation and make it more likely that you will accept.

background OVER THE LAST FIVE YEARS, SPENT IN EITHER INDUSTRIAL research or training, I have tried to find a low‐risk training method which relates the individual to his primary industrial group. The search inevitably led me to the various types of sensitivity training, all of which were distasteful (I can find no other word), because of the amount of deeply personal analysis that took place and its effects on certain people.