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Defines “developmental management” as based on individuality, attunement and alignment rather than on planning, co‐ordination and control. Discusses the “soft edge” of the organisation as opposed to the hierarchical and paternalistic side and compares European with Japanese styles. Considers it to be important now and will demand new management skills.

What part has work to play in a total life style? Conventional economists, now as in the past, tend to answer this question by saying that the purpose of work is to provide the worker with his livelihood in strictly economic terms. Today this view is being questioned and as jobs in paid employment become increasingly scarce the questionning increases too. And so a movement is gaining strength which seeks a new interpretation of the part to be played by work in an integrated life pattern. In the world at large this movement is huge and extremely varied, though relatively unrecognised. We asked Ronnie Lessem of the City University Business School and its Enterprise Development Unit, Urbed, to take readers for a brief excursion into this region of tomorrow's world.

The paper presents Spectral Management Theory as well as its applications to managerial and learning styles to a wide audience ‐ management trainers, human resource managers and general managers who have an interest in managerial development and organisational learning. The spectral approach leads to eight different kinds of management types or styles. The eight dimensions stem from the spectral theory of personality. It is based on three characteristics of a manager ‐ cognitive, affective, and behavioural. Recent managerial approaches lack a developmental element. The spectral approach answers this need. Apart from being a multidimensional analytical tool based on the reality of working life, it leads to individual and organisational development and learning. The Spectral Management Type Inventory (SMTI) is an analytical instrument designed to enable people to identify their personal management style. Moreover, it serves to stimulate learning processes that enable management to evolve through developmental stages.

This article focuses on, examines and contrasts two managerial inventories: the Spectral management theory (SMT) and the Belbin team roles inventory. The SMT inventory is one of the only approaches that involves not only a management typology, but also learning roles as well as team assessment. The theory leads to eight such types of managerial style, measured through an analytical instrument designed to enable people to identify their personal orientations. Belbin’s inventory is focused on team roles, prescribing nine options. Both were used to analyse members of top management teams in leading UK management buy‐outs. The analysis undertaken serves to enhance self awareness in the individual as well as team and organisational effectiveness. At the team level, it highlights the antecedents of successful teams, how and why they work together in harmony or dissonance, and what other teams may learn from the exercise.

In management, psychology, science and technology, we are becoming more conscious of networks and less blinkered by hierarchies. Charles Handy's four cultures based upon the ‘web’ and the ‘net’, as well as the ‘role’ and the ‘person’ — have extended managerial awareness. Ornstein, in his Psychology of Consciousness has popularised the notion of the two sides of the brain — one logical and analytical, and the other intuitive and aesthetic. Nature's network has become well known to us, through the emerging science of ecology and via David Attenborough and David Bellamy amongst others. The new physics epitomised by Gary Zukov's Dance of the Wuli Masters, has brought a causality into a world which has been dominated by Newtonian cause‐effect. Finally, and most visibly, electronic networks are bursting out all over, to envelop our mechanically man‐made world.

The spectral management type inventory (SMTI) is an analytical instrument designed to enable people to identify their personal management style. Examines the reliability and the validity of the SMTI questionnaire and the associations between the different management styles and work‐related variables of managers in various organizations. The SMTI was found to be a reliable and a valid tool for assessing management types. It may serve to enhance self‐awareness in the individual manager as well as improving organizational effectiveness. Discusses future opportunities for research and applications.

The New Enterprise Programmes In the last 18 months a series of courses have emerged, round the country, for people starting their own businesses. The majority of these have been sponsored by the Training Services Division under their ‘New Enterprise Programme’, and have been based in Manchester, Durham, Wales and London.

In two previous articles on “The New World of Work” (ICT, November 1982) and “The Creative Re‐integration of Business” (ICT, May 1983) I sketched out an agenda for business, tomorrow. Armed with what seemed to me home truths, I ventured across the Atlantic, to attend a conference on Organisational Transformation in New Hampshire. As I began to listen to those agents of transformation in the “land of plenty”, I became progressively more concerned. For the cupboard was bare. It was plain for me to see that the Americans had no fundamental answers. They were being stymied not by the great Russian Bear, but by their own projections on to the Japanese. So, I would have to gain confidence in my own answers.

Over the past year, I have been privileged enough to be observing, from very close quarters, eleven separate entrepreneurs starting up in business. The eleventh, incidentally, has been myself. Every week, over a period of three months, individuals have been reporting back on their progress, in the context of a new enterprise programme. While I have acted as sounding board, filter and catalyst, I have been able to record in detail the development of an embryo business. So it has been possible to really determine what it takes, to start up a business from the very earliest stages.

In my article on the New World of Work I alluded to three stages of business development and to their implications for work and employment. Via the ‘creative re‐integration of business’, I also conjured up a new world of business, where ‘intrapreneurs’ and ‘enablers’ came together with managers and entrepreneurs, and with consultants and craftsmen. In this follow up piece I want to focus on ‘Creative Re‐integration’, as our next step in business development. As a result, I shall be: • making the case for ‘Business Development’ as a new and vital, though hitherto neglected framework, for thinking about organisations • drawing together the economic, social and technological threads that are converging upon us, resulting in a genuinely new world of business • citing examples of innovative moves, within major corporations, towards creative re‐integration.