Ralph Coverdale

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Ralph Coverdale (1918–1975) was a British soldier, psychologist and business consultant. He founded The Coverdale Organisation and developed the Coverdale Training method, a forerunner of coaching in British industry. He worked with experimental psychologist Bernard Babington Smith to create a learning approach based on action, later called action learning or inductive learning.

Early life and education
Coverdale came from a family with Miles Coverdale, an early Bible translator. The family later became Roman Catholic, with relatives who joined religious orders. He was educated at Beaumont Jesuit College in Berkshire and, at age 18, joined Heythrop College, University of London, to become a Jesuit novice. In 1942 he left college to join the army, serving until 1947. He then studied psychology at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, under Bernard Babington Smith, who would become his adviser and later his colleague.

Career and training method
From 1950, Coverdale worked in opinion polling and psychological research. In 1955 he joined the Steel Company of Wales as Executive Development Officer and began developing the Coverdale Training method. In 1960 he moved to Esso as Head of Management Studies, a position he held for more than four years. In 1965 he founded The Coverdale Organisation. His training reached beyond the United Kingdom, with courses in Washington, D.C. After returning home, he suffered severe headaches and was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in February 1975 at age 56.

Influence and ideas
John Harvey-Jones, who studied Coverdale’s method at Imperial Chemical Industries, called him a “management genius.” Coverdale and Smith believed that business thinking and management could be developed, challenging the view that people have fixed skills or an unchangeable IQ. He preferred cooperation over conflict and believed lengthy analysis was less productive than synthesis and action. Skills, he argued, come from experience and practice, not just from study.