One quick thought that popped into this aging brain based on reading the previous notes, which were very educational for me as a management professor with no direct experience in any of the arts, is that of the consultant as a choreographer. In the early seventies a colleague and myself trained all the top and middle managers at Black and Decker in basic management theory and skills. The managers had complained about their new  Management by Objectives  system which had been imported from GE which had created the first  primative version of this system.  We studied it extensively with interviews , questionnaires, empirical data, and good measures of the personality characteristics and psychological needs of the managers using it (our dancers). Of course we already knew our dancers very well from training them previously.  Based on our research we created an improved system with the collaboration of the managers or dancers and implemented it with appropriate training (rehearsals) using role plays, films, detailed instructions, etc. and motivational techniques.  It was tailored to fit the capabilities and psychological needs of our managers just as choreographers do.  A year and a half later we studied the same managers with the same instruments and improved it further. In another year and a half did the same and then I did another analysis of it later. Company performance following was spectacular and we wrote over 30 papers and a book from this project and from an implementation we did in The Packing Corp of America. Later in the seventies I implemented it the Internal revenue Service where we created films for training as well as role playing techniques and where it still exists today. It seems to me now that we could have worked more efficiently without the many implementation problems we faced if we knew back then how good choreographers worked.

Stephen (Steve) Carroll
Maryland Business School
301/405-2239
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