Business School Faculty to Conduct Management Program in Guatemala

At the invitation of leading Central American businessmen, the Business School will conduct an advanced management training program in Antigua, Guatemala, this summer. The project will be jointly financed by the State Department Agency for International Development (A.I.D.) and by leaders of the Central American business community.

George Cabot Lodge '50, Assistant to the Director of the Division of International Activities for Central American Studies at the Business School, is director of the project, which is being sponsored by the newly-formed Central American Institute of Business Administration.

Among the five senior members of the Business School Faculty who will conduct the course is Dan T. Smith, professor of Finance and former Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury. The names of the others have not been announced, but Smith called it "a very strong Faculty group."

Approximately 50 top-level Central American managers are expected to pay the $1,000 admission fee for the intensive, month-long course.

"The curriculum is tailor-made to the problems of Central America." Smith said, "although it is not strictly confined to them." Instruction will be given by means of informal discussion, mainly of cases written by members of a research team that spent the summer in the region under the direction of Lodge and Thomas C. Raymond, professor of Business Administration.

According to the preliminary report of the team, "there is clearly a need to expose Central American managers, starting at the top, to the problems which they confront to encourage them to analyze these problems in depth, and to broaden their vision."

At the request of President Kennedy and the A.I.D., the nine-man research team directed by Raymond and Lodge spent novel weeks is the region this summer, interviewing more than 400 local managers.

On the recommendation of this team, the Business School Faculty voted Oct. 24 to extend for one year its contract made with the A.I.D. for the summer survey so as to accept the Central American Institute's invitation to conduct the course in Antigua in July.

"It's an experiment," said Lodge. "We hope and expect that the Institute will continue and grow into a major teaching, research, and consulting center in Central America first, and than in all of Latin America."