Psychology: Teaching Business Success

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In the two years following the course, McClelland and Winter periodically measured its effect. Some of the case histories, they report, read like Western success stories. A film exhibitor in the city of Kakinada expanded into the ticket-printing business and now supplies 45 theaters in four states. The owner of a small radio shop opened a branch office which he turned over to a woman manager (an unprecedented delegation of responsibility in India), called in an outstanding loan and established a paint and varnish factory.

McClelland feels that his experiment has a number of practical as well as theoretical implications. One is that the instant training of potential business leaders may be a quicker and more painless way of bringing economic motivation to an underdeveloped nation than by indiscriminate infusions of financial aid. The Indian businessmen who were stimulated by his course went on to expand their enterprises, thus creating new jobs and earning more money. Another bonus from the plan is the possible application of the n Ach stimulant theory to the black ghettos of U.S. cities. Boston's Behavioral Science Center has exposed a number of adult Negroes to a similar course and has had similarly encouraging results. "The tendency in India, and to a certain extent among black businessmen," says McClelland, "is to think: 'Things are beyond me. There is so much working against me. I can't make it anyhow.' "

Not for Accountants. Not everyone will make it, of course, and McClelland is careful to note that n Ach is not a quality that can be or even should be instilled in everyone. "Most people think that high achievement in life is caused by high need to achieve," he says. "That is clearly untrue. There are all kinds of achievers in life. The need to be a general is not a need to achieve in the way we define it. And you wouldn't want your accountant to have high n Ach." Politicians, like generals, hunger for power rather than achievement, he says. He has now embarked on a study of that need, which he will doubtless call n Pow.

"If there is one general conclusion that we hope will be drawn," write McClelland and Winter, "it is that man is not as predetermined in what he can do as social scientists and historians sometimes think. He has greater freedom to act, to change the structure of his response, and find opportunities in his environment than the traditional forms of social analysis would lead him to believe. Somehow, by thoroughly understanding how we are determined, we gain the confidence to act so as to transcend determinism."