Coverdale then went to St Catherine's College, Oxford where he read psychology under Bernard Babington Smith, who specialized in the nature of human perception. Smith would later become his advisor and business colleague.
In 1955 he joined the Steel Company of Wales as an Executive Development Officer and started his work on what would later become the Coverdale Training method.[4]
In 1960 he moved to Esso as Head of Management Studies, a position he would hold for more than four years, before setting up his own company, The Coverdale Organisation, in 1965.[3]
Coverdale's training went beyond the United Kingdom. His final series of courses were held in Washington, D.C. After his return, he suffered from severe headaches that was eventually diagnosed as being caused by lung cancer. He died in February 1975 at the age of 56.
John Harvey-Jones, who took Coverdale Training method at the ICI, would later describe Coverdale as a "management genius".[6]
Views
Coverdale and Smith believed that business-minded thinking and management were skills that could be developed. This challenged the orthodox view at the time that believed that people had fixed skill sets and an unchangeable IQ.
He had a mistrust of prolonged analysis, instead seeing it as a tool to encourage synthesis and action.[7] His training approach reflected this, asserting that skills were not taught like knowledge but instead learned from experience.
Bibliography
Risk Thinking – (1997), The Coverdale Organization (Posthumously) (ISBN0950560618)
References
^ abUnited States Civil Service Commission; Library (1973). Administration of training. Washington: For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off. OCLC1201626040.
Babington Smith, Bernard and Sharp, Alan (1990). Manager and Team Development: Ideas and Principles Underlying Coverdale Training. Heinemann Professional Publishing. ISBN0-434-918-784