Ralph Coverdale

Overview

Ralph Coverdale was a soldier, psychologist and management consultant. After leaving the army in 1947 Coverdale went to Oxford, where his supervisor was the experimental psychologist, Bernard Babington-Smith. It was during his Oxford days that Coverdale developed and refined his theories on how people think and work to get things done. He believed passionately that thinking and management were skills that could be developed, which seriously challenged the orthodox view of the time which regarded people as having fixed skill sets, and locked IQs. Coverdale and Babington Smith worked together for many years after the formation of the Coverdale Organisation and developed Coverdale Learning, which was a highly developed form of learning through action - subsequently described as action or inductive learning.

Coverdale is described as being a man of insight and passionate beliefs, and was strongly driven by the view that co-operation to mutual benefit was infinitely more productive than conflict and competition. Ralph Coverdale died in 1975 aged 56. By his peers he was recognised as the man who 'invented' coaching and was a pathfinder in the field of inductive and experiential learning.

Early life

His remote ancestor, Miles Coverdale, was one of the first Protestant translators of the bible, later the family became deeply Roman Catholic and produced both priests and nuns. He was educated at Beaumont Jesuit College, Berkshire, England and at the age of 18 attended Heythrop College, University of London, with the intention of becoming a Jesuit novice. However in 1942 he left the College and went into the army, serving until 1947, when he left with the rank of Captain.

He then went up to St Catherine's College, Oxford and read psychology, he received a first and it was here he first came into contact with Bernard Babington Smith as his tutor, and later as an advisor/colleague in his business career. Babington Smith specialised in the nature of human perception.

He came down from Oxford in 1950 and spent the next five years working for numerous organisations in the field of opinion surveys and psychological research.

Commercial career

In 1955 he joined the Steel Company of Wales as an Executive Development Officer and started his work on what is now known as Coverdale training.

In 1960 he moved to Esso as Head of Management Studies where he spent over four years before setting up his own company in 1965, now The Coverdale Organisation.

He had a mistrust of prolonged analysis and believed analysis was just a tool to be used in conjunction with purpose, thereby enabling synthesis and action. It was this premise, and the recognition that skills could not be taught like knowledge, but rather learnt from experience, that was the basis for his training approach.

A demand for Coverdale training had developed outside of the UK, one of the last acts he completed as head of the firm was a series of courses in Washington, DC, where on his return he was afflicted with severe headaches which doctors eventually diagnosed as a result of lung cancer, a condition he eventually died from in February 1975 at the age 56.

Sir John Harvey Jones described Ralph Coverdale as a management genius when discussing the Coverdale training he went through at ICI.

Quotes

"Life has to be lived forwards, though it can only be understood backwards."

"To overcome difficulties what has to be done is to take risks."

"Synthesis is combining situations and principles into a connected whole."