The Daniel Management Center ((DMC) at the Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina, is a comprehensive organization dedicated to helping its clients improve the practice of management and leadership. As one of the first management centers in the Southeast, the DMC has served nearly 250,000 managers from a wide range of organizations over the past thirty years. Our portfolio of products and services is always changing to meet the growing needs of our customers. We have expanded our focused seminars to address the most pressing business and leadership issues. (Please see http://mooreschool.sc.edu/moore/dmc.

Dr. Fletcher, while acting as Manager of Integrated Management Solutions, developed a curriculum for executive management training entitled The Integrated Management Program (IMP). The program was based on the premise that the manager is the primary integrator in his or her area of responsibility, whether it is as a R&D group leader, department head, plant manager, or corporate officer. While the program addressed all the areas of a traditional MBA (i.e. management, finance, marketing, accounting, economics), its emphasis was not on a rigorous treatment of content as taught by experts in these respective fields, but on how the various areas are integrated. Each module showed how the basic concepts were developed from first principles and how they integrated into a picture of the whole firm and influenced the corporate bottom line. The program was not intended to be a substitute for the rigorous and extensive treatment of each of the subject areas but was designed to introduce participants to how the pieces of the corporate puzzle fit together.

The second emphasis was on quantitative issues as opposed to those important areas that relate to leadership and other “softer” management concerns. These topics, that include time management, conflict management, negotiation skills, and managerial coaching, were well covered in other courses in the Daniel Management Center. The series specifically addressed a segment of the management population called “computer literate upwardly mobile managers.” The intent was to offer specific training for those managers who already are computer literate and who would like to see the bigger picture of how numbers influence the entire scope of their managerial responsibilities.

The overall goal was to equip managers to be sensitive not only as to how the entire scope of quantitative issues influences the success of the commercial enterprise, but to give them an array of insights into how to engage others in the organization in meaningful activities that are designed to achieve the quantitative goals of the firm. Ultimately the goal is to give managers the “number” tools to be able to take on more and more leadership responsibility up to and including running a large and complex organization.

While at the DMC, Dr. Fletcher not only designed the IMP curriculum but taught the core course entitled Managerial Budgeting and Planning.